ABSTRACT
This chapter explores a backroad suffix, sphere, through an old term, the noosphere, not only to see how workable 'noosphere' itself is, but to offer an avowedly spatial metaphor as a counterpoint to the abundance of temporal metaphors on offer in contemporary planetary thinking. Discussing the noosphere means discussing actual complexes of knowledge production: the physical locations, incentives, material conditions, economic arrangements and social formations that make possible the knowledge, theory, observation, description and ideas that constitute the noosphere. The chapter concerns human knowledge considered as a global network of interacting constituents in self-replicating loops and nested systems. That is, knowledge considered on the model of the biosphere, and as part of the biosphere. The noosphere and biosphere cannot be separated. A 'material metabolism' operates between the two. Consider John Urry's claim that 'humans are part of nature but, in working on that nature, transform themselves and the material world.
