The Sociosphere
Reading Hellworld #1
(Languages: Portuguese version courtesy of Antipoda)
In this series, I review and expand on various topics raised in my book Hellworld, using the opportunity to further elaborate key ideas, to situate them within the larger literature, or to explain the process through which they developed. As always, the material posted here is rough and freeform, following my semi-stream-of-consciousness drafting style. Rather than polished pieces, these entries are therefore best treated as liveblogged notes, complete with typos and tangents, and often including visuals only incidentally related to the core content.
The previous post introduced the concept of the “technosphere,” discussed in detail in the second chapter of Hellworld, “Crust of the Earth.” The term originally comes from geologist Peter K. Haff, who argues that “an emerging geological process … has entrained humans as essential components to support its dynamics…”[1] Contra the narrative of the “Anthropocene” popularized in the same years, however, “humanity” does not itself constitute this “emerging geological process” in Haff’s account. In fact, humanity is the lower-order agent, “entrained” to the higher-order, emergent logic of technology, which comes to constitute itself as a geospheric system. Haff defines this technosphere as
the set of large-scale networked technologies that underlie and make possible rapid extraction from the Earth of large quantities of free energy and subsequent power generation, long-distance, nearly instantaneous communication, rapid long-distance energy and mass transport, the existence and operation of modern governmental and other bureaucracies, high-intensity industrial and manufacturing operations including regional, continental and global distribution of food and other goods, and a myriad [sic] additional ‘artificial’ or ‘non-natural’ processes without which modern civilization and its present 7 × 10 9 human constituents could not exist.[2]
Much of the Hellworld chapter is devoted to critically unpacking this idea of the technosphere. The core of this critique is simply that Haff is deploying an almost entirely asocial theory of technology, in which a basically mechanical logic (in fact, simply the second law of thermodynamics) commands social structures and, through them, the movement of mass across the planet.
As in the previous post, Lewis Mumford’s theory of technics (especially as deployed by Jason W. Moore) is counterposed to Haff’s account. While this theory more effectively alloys the social and the technical, however, it still tends to give too much credit to the technical side. These problems are visible in Mumford’s notion of social institutions as “megamachines” and this tendency in his work arguably predisposed subsequent readers toward a technical reductionism centered on Mumford’s division of the world into distinct technic “eras” (the Eotechnic, Paleotechnic, Neotechnic etc.) defined by bundles of foundational technologies. At the same time, despite its more rudimentary understanding of technology, Haff’s account actually offers a far better description of how a supervening logic can emerge at the planetary scale from lower-order forms of agency which it then systematically entrains to its imperatives. In this sense, the theory of the technosphere is in fact more Marxist (at least in its conceptual structure) than Mumford’s theory of technics.
In other words, the technosphere is simply the alienated appearance of a more fundamental “sociosphere,” in which social dynamics prevail over purely technical ones.
Borrowing a phrase from Martín Arboleda, the chapter goes on to argue that Haff’s “technosphere” is not itself a geospheric system but is instead the “technical exoskeleton” of capitalist society. In other words, the technosphere is simply the alienated appearance of a more fundamental “sociosphere,” in which social dynamics prevail over purely technical ones. Though capitalism is the first truly planetary society in this sense, it is not the only possible one. This notion, along with the chapter’s title, “Crust of the Earth,” and the idea of “cadastral space” explained in the previous post, are all drawn from an article by Amadeo Bordiga (co-founder of the Italian Communist Party) titled “The human species and the Earth’s crust.”
As explained in the pages of Hellworld:
In the form of an exposition on Marx’s theory of ground rent published in the early 1950s, Bordiga argued that human settlement under capitalism takes on a cadastral form - a map cut up into land registry cadastres, assigning an owner to every inch of the Earth to whom ground rents for each plot accrue - which extends not simply to exchangeable rights over the surface of the planet but also inaugurates a new historic stage ‘in the disposition of human installation on the earth’s ‘crust,’ in other words in a layer which extends above and below the surface of the soil.’ This layer is planetary, and its dynamic nodes are the agglomerations of human habitation and industrial activity visible in urban centres. But, for Bordiga, this is not exactly a ‘technosphere,’ because technology is only ancillary to its formation, a second-order effect. The character of this sphere is instead historically malleable, changing alongside revolutions in human social organisation. It is, in other words, better described as a sort of ‘sociosphere,’ – an emergent geospheric system defined by the aggregate social metabolism of the human species with the non-human world.[3]
As this section makes clear, what appears to be the mere mechanical movement of mass through a global mesh of technical systems is, in fact, the dynamic material of a planet-spanning social metabolism. And, again, we can see these social-metabolic structures literally carved into the crust of the earth in satellite imagery:
This is a real-color image of the Três Lagoas area in Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil, at the confluence of the Sucuriú and Paraná rivers. Mato Grosso do Sul is a largely agricultural state and one of the country’s largest producers of soy. The area is also a major producer of livestock, and Três Lagoas itself serves as a hub for meatpacking and cattle shipping. Here, we see these economic specialties etched into the soil, visible as a grid of monocultures shaped by and plugged directly into global value chains. More specifically, we can think of this area as a specialized operational territory in what Swarnabh Ghosh, Neil Brenner, and Nikos Katsikis term the “Global Industrial Feedlot Matrix (GIFM).” The extraverted nature of the area’s geographyic development is apparent from the satellite image alone. But the scale is not necessarily evident: if it were a country, Mato Grosso do Sul would be the fifth largest producer of oilseeds in the world. As a result, the territory can only be understood through its linkages to global agroindustrial supply chains, with demand from food product manufacturers in China, for example, directly sculpting the agrarian space of a relatively poor part of Southwestern Brazil.
This process in which distant territories mutually sculpt one another through social interdependence rendered via economic abstractions is a key feature of the GIFM. More broadly, Ghosh, Brenner, and Katsikis, describe the GIFM as “a planet-encompassing metabolic circuit fueled by fossil energy, voracious land-use intensification, colossal infrastructural investment, and rampant environmental destruction.”[4] The agricultural plots visible in Três Lagoas can therefore be understood as one geographic dimension of the “multiscalar operational landscapes that support this circuit of capital and onto which its socio-environmental contradictions are projected.”[5] Moreover, the GIFM is an expansive concept that includes not only the physical landscapes of agricultural production but also “labor relations, land-use systems, industrial infrastructures, relays of fossil-based energy, logistics grids, plumes of carbon emissions, as well as technoscientifically mediated multispecies entanglements between human worker-consumers, commodity animals, and pathogens.”[6] It can therefore be understood as something like the agroindustrial dimension of the social metabolism, through which the sociosphere is interlinked with biospheric and, to a certain extent, lithospheric, hydrospheric, and atmospheric systems.
In more general terms, we can say that social domination as such always emerges from and is structured by differential forms of engagement with and control over the metabolic interface.
As the inclusion of “labor relations” in the description indicates, however, metabolic processes are also the material root of class power. In more general terms, we can say that social domination as such always emerges from and is structured by differential forms of engagement with and control over the metabolic interface. More specifically: class emerges in the space of possibility that exists due to human reliance on tools to bridge the metabolic gap. As explained by Søren Mau: “Humans are bound to mediate their metabolism through tools, but there is no necessary way to organize this mediation … Human corporeal organization opens up an immense space of possibility founded on a necessity: a metabolism must be established, but its social form is never simply given.”[7] From the earliest eras of human history, this space is therefore marked by political struggle: “The fact that parts of the human body can be concentrated as property in the hands of other members of the species has the consequence that power can weave itself into the very fabric of the human metabolism.”[8]
For Mau, this possibility is only fully exploited in capitalism, where the subsumption of the production process is able to restructure both sides the metabolic interface. Jason W. Moore therefore describes the history of capitalist development as progressing through a series of “world-ecological revolutions,” in which “new natures” are “co-produced by the biosphere and capitalism” via “innovations of capital, science, and empire…” Through its unique combination of social, technical, and ecological dynamics, each “long wave” of accumulation “creates—and is created by—a historical nature that offers a new, specific set of constraints and opportunities.”[9] Drawing from world-systems theory, Moore is also able to trace these transformations further backward into the early history of capitalism and beyond, illustrating the transformative social impact of deforestation in the Amazon and in Europe’s Vistula Basin, of the mining and metallurgical revolution of Central Europe, of the Low Country agricultural revolution, and of the expanding frontiers of sugar production from Madeira to São Tomé to Brazil, all from at least the 15th century onward. In each case, Moore notes how late-medieval environmental crises were induced by and helped to create new technical interfaces with the non-human world that then produced new historical natures and how distinctly capitalist social forms took shape through this process.
This is an important counterpoint to Mau, whose rhetorical method sometimes seems to suggest that social domination was not as thoroughly woven into the metabolic gap in previous modes of production. For example, Mau notes that capitalism is premised on a widening the separation between producers and the means of production and, as a result, he portrays pre-capitalist modes of production as simply premised on the “intimate and permanent connection between the producer … and the means of production.”[10] Elsewhere, he notes that, by transposing social power into the material environment (a procedure that follows from this separation), direct violence is less necessary in the day-to-day management of production in capitalism. This is again contrasted to earlier modes of production, where direct coercion was a constitutive element of the class structure. In fact, the contrast invoked by Mau often suggests too harsh a difference, as when he counterposes the weaving of power into the fabric of the social metabolism with a presumably precapitalist form of power that attaches “itself externally to the metabolism and violently pump[s] out surplus labor like a leech…”[11]
Mau himself is not actually making the argument that this is how earlier modes of production functioned (elsewhere, he offers much more nuanced views on this question). But the suggestion seems natural precisely because such explanations of the features unique to capitalist society so often rely on a rhetorical contrast in which pre-capitalist forms appear in exaggerated proportions: as extrinsic forms of domination in which domination was enacted through direct violence, innovation was suppressed, trade and monetary exchange were extremely limited, etc. Thus, although the historical emergence of the sociosphere can only be understood through a theoretical elaboration of the abstract laws of motion of capitalist society—qualitatively distinct from those that governed pre-capitalist forms of social metabolism—the process must also be inset within a longer history of social domination as such, in which power has always been deployed in and through a dialectical transformation of both the “social” and “environmental” side of the metabolic interface. In other words, the specifically capitalist xenoformation of the crust of the Earth under materialized flows of value is itself a metastasized expression of a deeper “civilizational” impulse emanating from class society as such.
At a very high level, we can understand the distinction as follows: the inauguration of a single, unified sociospheric system has been constituted through the unique laws of motion of capitalist society. Though this was not a logical necessity, it is nonetheless an evident historic fact, traceable in all the measures invoked by Haff and also detailed in “Crust of the Earth,” including: the obvious transformation of the atmosphere and ensuing environmental catastrophes, the fact that the sum of abiotic anthropic material (namely concrete, asphalt, and waste material) is now larger (in mass terms) than the entirety of the biosphere, and the equally stark fashion in which fundamental mass flows have accelerated through human intervention (as in the outpacing of natural denudation by anthropic mass movement). At the more mundane level, the existence of a sociospheric system is confirmed in the way that the global economy functions as a supervening force entraining our own lives to its abstract imperatives, such that day-to-day subsistence in one location can be disrupted by a major crisis breaking out on the other side of the globe. As the controversy over the recent US tariffs has demonstrated, we find ourselves suspended within a complex mesh of social relationships with people across the planet whether we like it or not.
This is not the only possible sociosphere, of course. In the early 20th century, Soviet geochemist Vladimir Vernadsky—notably among the first scientists to recognize that atmospheric oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon dioxide derive from the biosphere—claimed that the victory of the socialist revolution across the globe would ultimately elevate human reason into a geospheric force. The advance of scientific and ecological principles enabled by this revolutionary process would ultimately allow for a simultaneously social and physical resculpting of the planet resulting in a “new evolutionary state of the biosphere” in which “rational human action becomes the decisive factor in biosphere development.”[12] Vernadsky’s more conventional work would later go on to influence early environmental science, including the modern conception of the biosphere. And, although the notion of the noosphere was subsequently taken up by early New Age thinkers and further muddied in early theories equating the emergence of the internet with the rise of a collective consciousness, Vernadsky himself saw it in largely scientific terms:
Vernadsky understood the noosphere as a lawful stage in the evolution of the biosphere. The crucial characteristic of his last stage of biospheric evolution is the dominance of scientific reason. Science influences, accelerates, transforms and takes under its control the “natural” biospherical processes. At the same time, science is also a natural planetary phenomenon.[13]
More specifically, for Vernadsky, “The noosphere emerges at the point where humankind, through the mastery of nuclear processes, begins to create energy resources through the nuclear transmutation of elements.”[14]
Such mastery was, however, not guaranteed but instead contingent on the success of the revolutionary project of social transformation. And it goes without saying that, ultimately, the Soviet project failed to induce the global revolutionary wave necessary for this qualitatively more advanced sociospheric system to take shape. Instead, through the defeat of the global communist movement rather than its victory, the inherently international drive of capitalist accumulation is what eventually knit together the species into a single “material community” (to use the language of Jacques Camatte). Any future noospheric system will, therefore, be the outcome of a revolutionary transformation occurring across the already-existing sociosphere, rather than the means through which dispersed metabolic processes are first united into a planetary system. But this also poses a more interesting question in the opposite direction: given humankind’s sustained influence on the biosphere, far predating capitalism, can we say that something like a sociospheric system existed in the past as well?
This question is more difficult to answer, requiring a far more extensive exploration of environmental history. In a subsequent post, I’ll explore some of the thinking on modes of production and theoretical debates over the nature of historical materialism. For now, we might propose that earlier forms of organizing the social metabolism were both relatively localized and, over time, exhibited a gradual, albeit stuttering process of moderate global integration via the mechanics outlined by world-systems theorists: materially “light” links of long-distance trade in key materials between materially “heavier” population centers, creating forms of de facto interdependence between otherwise distinct social-metabolic assemblages. Whether or not the process had any teleological necessity, the observed historical pattern is that intertwined social and technical revolutions tended, over time, to further this integration. Until the emergence of capitalism, however, this was, at best, a proto-sociospheric mosaic of metabolisms. In addition to demonstrating a quantitatively higher degree of material integration and grander scale of mass movement, capitalist society is therefore qualitatively different insofar as it constitutes the first truly planetary organization of the human metabolism with the non-human world on this sociospheric scale, within which the same fundamental social forms prevail in any given location.
[1] Haff, Peter K “Technology as a geological phenomenon: implications for human well-being”, in C.N. Waters, J.A. Zalasiewicz, M. Williams, M.A. Ellis and A.M. Snelling (Eds) A Stratigraphical Basis for the Anthropocene. The Geological Society of London, Special Publications, 395, 2013. p.302.
[2] Ibid, pp.301-302
[3] Hellworld, p. 112
[4] Swarnabh Ghosh, Neil Brenner, and Nikos Katsikis, “The Global Industrial Feedlot Matrix: A Metabolic Monstrosity”, in Jeffrey S. Nesbit and Charles Waldheim (Eds.), Technical Lands: A Critical Primer, Berlin: Jovis, 2022. p.134
[5] ibid
[6] ibid
[7] Søren Mau, Mute Complsuion: A Marxist Theory of the Economic Power of Capital, New York: Verso, 2023. p.101
[8] ibid, p.115
[9] Jason W. Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital, New York: Verso, 2015. p.150-151
[10] Mau 2023, p. 140
[11] ibid, p.115
[12] Inar I. Mochalov, "Vladimir Vernadsky: cosmos, Earth, life, man, reason—from biosphere to noosphere." Earth system: History and natural variability 4 (2009): 384-434.
[13] Geroge S. Levit, Biogeochemistry – Biosphere – Noosphere: The Growth of the Theoretical System of Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky, Berlin: VWB, 2001. p. 84
[14] Heinz Kautzleben and Axel Müller, “Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky (1863–1945) — From mineral to noosphere”, Journal of Geochemical Exploration, Vol. 147, Part A, December 2014. pp.4-10
bro is spitting here