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Building on recent work identifying how the infrastructures of human social and economic life themselves depend on the "natural infrastructure" of biogeochemical systems, I explore the idea that infrastructuring - involving causal relations between subsystems operating at different timescales - might be a strategy widely adopted by matter undergoing self-organization under planetary conditions. I analyze the concept of infrastructure as it is used to describe features of the human "technosphere" and identify the importance of a difference in timescales between supporting and supported structures and processes. I explore some examples of how the wider planet might be said to engage in timescale-distancing and infrastructuring, focusing in particular on examples from the hydrosphere and biosphere. I then turn to the question of how to explain infrastructuring, developing a neocybernetic account of infrastructuring as involving the separation of a system into subsystems at different timescales in mutual but asymmetrical causal relations. I conclude by exploring the implications of this approach for the way we think about planets in general and the human technosphere.

In this paper I make a case for a philosophy of continuous matter, in dialogue with object-oriented ontology. A continuous-matter philosophy is one that focuses not on the identity, properties, and relations of discrete, countable objects, but on the nature of extended substances, both in relation to human experience and in terms of their own "inner life." I explore why and under what conditions humans might perceive the world as objects or as continuous substances, and the language that humans use for talking about both. I argue that approaching the world as continua requires the foregrounding of concepts that emphasize the immanent (internal to a region of space), the inclusive (with contrasting properties coexisting in the same substance), the gradual (manifesting differentially at different points), and the generative or virtual (involving the constant production of form and new gradients). I suggest that starting philosophy from continuous matter rather than objects also has wider implications for speculative thought

In a reply to 'Speculative Listening' by Kaya Barry, Michele Lobo and Michelle Duffy, I defend representation as a resource for experimental and speculative practice, arguing that the loss of total immersion in the flux and becoming of the world that the representational engenders is a precondition for experimentation and speculation.

In this chapter I argue that we can start to extend political ideas to other entities within the Earth through deploying an intermediary concept such as 'memory'. In the domain of human politics, there has been much attention to the role of collective memory in the politics of recognition and justice – but also the role that active forgetting can play in creating the conditions for progressive social change. What about the politics of the Earth? Natural scientists sometimes us the word 'memory' to describe biological or even geophysical process: they talk of 'climate memory', or 'ecological memory', or materials as having 'shape memory'. But what would happen if we took such usages seriously, and applied the idea of memory to a complex entity like a planet? How could the Earth be said to remember and to forget? What memory systems has the Earth evolved in its 4.5 billion-year 'geostory'? And if the Earth is indeed entering 'the Anthropocene', a new geological epoch in which humans are the determining geological force, how might the Anthropocene be inserting itself into the memory systems of the Earth? Might thinking of the Earth as something that remembers and forgets change the way that we think about this thing we call the Anthropocene, what it is and what it means?

In this paper I situate the Situationists' derive within an analysis of drift as a planetary phenomenon. Using the concept of the middle voice', I suggest that drifting can lead us to a deeper understanding of the way that all things move, that move within the extended body of the Earth. I develop the idea of driftwork', in which drift is subsumed within a wider set of purposes or functions, and describe different forms of more-than-human driftwork, with different political implications. I conclude by suggesting that things adrift can help us trace the lineaments of a planetary ethic: an ethic that extends beyond the human, the animal, and the living to the whole extended body of the Earth; that allows us to recontextualize human practices of drifting within a planetary context; that is sensitive to the debt that all moving things owe to the planetary mobility commons that enables their motion; and that helps us to recognize our obligations of care towards all drifting things.

In the Parthenon frieze, the time of mortals and the time of gods seem to merge. Dipesh Chakrabarty has argued that with the advent of the Anthropocene the times of human history and of the Earth are similarly coming together. Are humans entering the 'monumental time' of the Earth, to stand alongside the Olympian gods of the other geological forces? This article first looks at the cultural shifts leading to the modern idea of separate human and Earth histories. It examines the changing use of monuments to mediate between human and other temporalities. It explores the use of 'stratigraphic sections' as natural monuments to mark transitions between the major time units of Earth history, and the erection of intentional monuments nearby. It suggests that the Anthropocene, as a geological epoch-in-the-making, may challenge the whole system of monumental semiotics used to stabilize our way of thinking about deep time.

In this paper I explore the metaphor of the strata of the earth as 'great stone book of nature', and the Anthropocene epoch as its latest chapter. I suggest that the task of marking the base of the Anthropocene's geological layer is entangled with questions about the human — about who would be the 'onomatophore' of the Anthropocene, would carry the name of 'Anthropos'. I consider divergent ways of characterising the geological force of the Anthropocene — as Homo faber, Homo consumens and Homo gubernans — and situate this dispersal of the Anthropos within a more general dispersal of 'man' that occurs when human meets geology. I suggest that the becoming geological of the human in the Anthropocene is both the end of the great stone book of nature and the Aufhebung of 'man' — both his apotheosis and his eclipse.