Among other things, planetarity is about grasping the planet as a planet. The conditions for doing so are propitious for the first time in history and has been enabled by two ongoing capacities.
The first is the possibility of grasping the planet as the Earth, and the enormous expansion of socio-technical systems that sense and represent the Earth's biochemical and ecological processes.
The second leg on which our exploration will stand is the possibility of seeing the planet as the Globe, which, through political, economic, and media globalization, has made it possible to experience the expanse of the planet as belonging to human society as a whole.
The two coming together are what make the planet possible. And I believe that we are on the verge of being able to glimpse that - but more soon on what’s missing.
If you think this is too abstract an idea, consider how we are able to grasp that we are citizens of as nations. I can grasp India as India. I may live in Bangalore, or I may live as I am doing right now in Boston, and yet not see India as just the people around me, but as a nation and to see people in the streets of Bangalore, not just as Bangalorians, but also as Indians.
We have the mental, institutional, social infrastructure to grasp each other's presence as citizens of India. That's an achievement of the last 200 or so years. It was not possible before that. At some point in the late 19th century, people started saying "let us see India as India." And that, of course, was the origin of our nationalist movement, which led to the struggle that started with imagining India as India and concluded with inhabiting India as Indians.
It's now time to imagine the planet as the planet. We have the building blocks. We have the Earth. We have the Globe. But the two put together is what makes the Planet. Over time, I want to be able to outline the moves that make that merger possible. It's definitely not going to be history of the development of the sensor networks or the development of globalization at the economic or political level, but I want to sketch out the moves that make the Globe possible, the Earth possible, and then the meeting of the Globe and the Earth in the form of the planet possible.
The Planet as a Colony
There are many ways of viewing the Planet as a mashup of the Globe and the Earth. One recent formulation says:
The Planetary is at once a technoscientific object, a philosophical event, and a call to new forms of governance.
But these views downplay the existential concerns that animate planetarity. We wouldn’t be here unless there was a credible threat to all life on earth, would we? An Anthropocene in which humans lived peacefully with one another and with all other creatures in a planetary Eden might as well be the Globe. The Planet comes into view only when our lives are threatened.
An in order to understand that threat, we have to include a perspective missed by most contemporary commentators on planetarity - perhaps because of where they’re located - that the planet is a colony. People out west think of colonizing Mars, but they forget they can launch themselves from atop the Earth precisely because they have colonized it. What are some of the outposts of this planetary colony? I can think of a few:
The coral reef
The factory farm
The satellite
The data center
The stock market
The sand mine
The nuclear bomb/plant
The science-fiction show
I am sure there are a few more, and looking at the list, you might think it’s more like a Celestial Emporium than a coherent category, but so what? Deal with the chaos.
While it’s climate change that’s often invoked as the existential concern that makes us think of the Earth as a Planet, IMHO, that’s a temporary concern, and not even the first one. Nuclear weapons were the first sign of an existential politics whose ultimate explanation is planetary rather than global. Specific concerns (yesterday’s Nuclear Winter, today’s Global Warming) will come and go, but the condition of planetarity is here to stay.
Each outpost deserves some attention, and bit by bit, the colonized planet comes into view. A claim we read in many a history book is that decolonization started for real in 1945, that the old European empires, the British, the French, were exhausted by the fighting even though they were winners, and it was only a matter of time before they let go of their colonial possessions. India got independence in 1947 - soon after the end of hostilities.
But here's another way of reading the last eighty years. It's that colonization never stopped. It just went from colonizing nations to colonizing the planet. And in fact, I may say that maybe there's a continuous history of colonization from 1492 until today, with a very crude periodization that goes as:
Early era: colonizing the Americas with little understanding and extreme brutality, followed by settler colonialism that continued the brutality.
Organized era: colonization with capitalist intent, such as that undertaken by the British and the French in Asia and Africa to extract resources and capture markets.
Modern era: After 1945, we are entering the condition of planetary colonization (beginning with the Cold War and symbolized by the nuclear weapon), with the space race as an added attraction.
The first two colonial periods are important but not my remit, which is strictly about the third. Take the enormous expansion of science fiction and of the Star Trek ideal of boldly going where no one has gone before. You could argue that the European colonizers in 1492 were like a brutal version of Kirk in that they were boldly going where (at least according to them) no one had gone before. Terra Nova. As it so turns out, there were people there already. And boy, did they suffer from the whip of the master.
Scroll down a few centuries and planetary colonization becomes a thing after 1945. Nuclear war threatens all life on earth. The space race, including the idea that we could be colonizing other planets, also leads to the treatment of the Earth itself as a planet. We didn’t know it at that time, but the Earth was being rediscovered in its condition of planetarity after 1945. And arguably, the last eighty years have been more like the Spanish or Portuguese colonization, which laid waste to the Potosi’s of the world, than to the more calculative colonization in round two.
Colonization as crude plunder. No civilizing mission (we don’t want that either….), colonization that’s about extracting whatever we want from wherever we want, from the bottom of the Pacific to the heights of the Himalayas. Everything is ours to gobble. I believe that is the phase of planetary colonization we are in today, and calling it a “technoscientific object, a philosophical event, and a call to new forms of governance” is an incomplete description. It’s this metastatized colonizing instinct that’s coming up against the hard truths of the Earth’s biogeochemical processes.
And code - electronic, genetic, linguistic - plays a big role in this encounter.
We will start our tour of outposts next week, but with an unlikely guide. If you recall, I started this “Pauper” series based on a very eclectic reading of Machiavelli’s “The Prince.”
Our tour guide is a recent Machiavellian figure and one of the first (though he wouldn’t say that) theorists of Planetarity. That’s Hermann Kahn, infamously the model for Dr. Strangelove in Kubrick’s iconic movie about nuclear war.
Over the next few weeks, we will read the H-man while touring the outposts his empire helped create. According to Wikipedia
After Kubrick read Kahn's book On Thermonuclear War, he began a correspondence with him which led to face-to-face discussions between Kubrick and Kahn.
We too will read On Thermonuclear War, but Dr. Kahn has moved on to the great beyond so we will have to satisfy ourselves with his words alone.