Passages to the outside: A prelude to a geophilosophy of the future

Abstract

What might it take to reimagine the futures of geographical thought on an Earth whose geological disjunctures and catastrophic dynamics have radically upended the progressive temporality that once made of ‘the future’ a modern article of faith and a matter of concern? What, in other words, is the future to those practices animated by the metamorphic forces of the Earth? Seeking to inhabit the problem-space these questions generate, this commentary suggests that at stake is nothing less than the challenge of learning to think of futurity immanently, as a problem of space. The challenge is to reimagine the future not as the promise of a yet-to-come but as a passage to the outside: to those immanent zones of indeterminacy, anarchy, and contingency composed in the interstices and outlaw edges of every territory, where impossible forms of sociality and speculative methodologies of life are improvised in the act of striding the movements and forces of an unstable and tumultuous earth, giving themselves over to the inchoate and the unformed, to a groundlessness that surrounds and subtends every ground, to a runaway metamorphosis which eludes finality and escapes totality. That, indeed, might be the task of a geophilosophy of the future.