Mechanosphere: Man, Earth, Capital

Abstract

This chapter will elaborate on a concept mentioned a few times in A Thousand Plateaus, mechanosphere, which will be refashioned in order to obtain a politics worthy of the Anthropocene. Deleuze and Guattari did not know the extent to which global warming and resource depletion would come to dominate the already crisis-ridden global economic and geopolitical system. In Deleuze and Guattari’s geophilosophy, following Nietzsche, any nonhumanist return to body, matter, life, or things has to contend with the disruptive and uncontainable powers of the planet. More concretely, following Marx, the immense capacity of capital to de-and reterritorialize almost everything cannot be absent from any critical mapping of the predicament of the human (and most other) species at the start of the twenty-first century. As biogeochemistry, as pioneered by Vladimir Vernadsky and James Lovelock, makes inroads into the humanities and the global public sphere, geophilosophy provides the best conceptual framework for researching the capitalist catastrophes coming our way. In the place of the lingering ideological notion of man, who rearranged earth for exploitation along colonial and patriarchal lines, mechanosphere is a newly materialist concept for becoming-revolutionary in a heterodox Marxist sense. The earth is no objective realm to be known and mastered, but has always imperiled human production as much as it has subtended it.