Introduction to Comparative Planetology

By Lukáš Likavčan

Introduction to Comparative Planetology presents an intertwined analysis of visual cultures of imagining the Earth and geopolitics of climate emergency. It compares different "figures" of the planet – the Planetary, the Globe, the Terrestrial, Earth-without-us and Spectral Earth – in order to assess their geopolitical implications. These implications are then mapped on respective prospects of these figures in developing an infrastructural space for planetary coordination of our design interventions against runaway global heating, and ultimately against mass species extinction.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Strelka Press
• Release date: Dec 1, 2019
• ISBN: 9785907163041

Book preview

Introduction to Comparative Planetology

Lukáš Likavčan

Contents

Acknowledgements

I. Introduction: The geo of the geopolitical

II. The Planetary

III. The Globe

IV. The Terrestrial

V. Earth-without-us

VI. Spectral Earth

VII. Conclusion: Cosmo­grammatology, or geopolitics after the Anthropocene

Endnotes

Acknowledgements

Special thanks to those who commented on the early stages of this manuscript: Bohuslav Binka, Nicolay Boyadjiev, Benjamin Bratton, Paul Heinicker, Bogna M Konior, Theo Merz, Jussi Parikka, Anna Remešová, Manuel Scholz-Wäckerle, Whitney Stark, and Solveig Suess.

This essay has been developed with the generous support of Strelka Institute for Media, Architecture and Design, Moscow, and Department of Environmental Studies, Faculty of Social Sciences, Masaryk University, Brno. This essay was partially written within the framework of the Fellowship program of BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht.

This publication was written at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague with the support of the Institutional Endowment for the Long Term Conceptual Development of Research Institutes, as provided by the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports of the Czech Republic in 2019.

Chapter II, Chapter III, and Chapter IV were based on an earlier essay published as It Came Out of the Blue: Fragment of Comparative Planetology, in The Most Beautiful Catastrophe, ed. Jakub Gawkowski (CSW Kronika Bytom, 2018).

Chapter VI and Chapter VII were based on an earlier essay published as Spectral Earth, or Designing Culture for Extinction, in CABAL no. 1, ed. Chiara di Leone (2019).

Once again our estimate of the station’s size has been substantially revised. The station clearly has the dimensions of a large asteroid or even a small planet. Our instruments indicate that there are thousands of decks, each extending for miles across an undifferentiated terrain of passenger concourses, lounges, and restaurant terraces. As before there is no sign of any crew or supervisory staff. Yet somehow a vast passenger complement was moved through this planetary waiting room.

— J. G. Ballard, Report on an Unidentified Space Station

I. Introduction: The geo of the geopolitical

When the US Department of Energy rebranded natural gas as molecules of freedom in late May 2019,¹ I was finishing the manuscript of this essay. It seemed an illustration of what I was working to explore: how the chemistry of our planet evaporates our old modes of political thinking. Climate emergency shows us that if chemistry is political, politics is also chemical; or in other words, politics always involves the operation and manipulation of chemical compounds and processes.² What does this mean? Not simply that politics can be completely reduced to some set of chemical procedures (in the bodies of bipedal mammals or in the ecosystems they are surrounded by), but that politics as we know it is contested by the fluid, dynamic and precarious realities of politics-to-come, where every action can be read as a chemical process in the planetary ecosystem, since it is linked — directly or indirectly — to carbon emissions, metabolism of methane and nitrogen, acidification of the oceans, and so on. Among other things, the spreading of a certain concept of freedom, for example free-market fundamentalism, then also equals the spreading of certain chemical elements, for example carbohydrates.³

In turn, it is not just disasters such as fires in the Amazon rainforest or the Congo basin that are rendered in this perspective political because of a massive release of CO2 combined with a gradual loss of natural carbon capture capacities provided by vegetation. When the EU, at the beginning of September 2019, considered declaring a potential no-deal Brexit a major natural disaster,⁴ it made — perhaps unwittingly — yet another gesture towards politics-to-come: the socio-economic consequences of Britain leaving the EU are also a planetary chemical event, just as the ongoing trade war between China and the US or a looming conflict between Iran and Saudi Arabia with its allies. For example, the slowdown of international trade affected by such events can be mapped into relative fluctuations in CO2 emissions or in resource extraction.

Comparative planetology

The politics-to-come depart from very different sets of fundamental assumptions and are informed by very different philosophical and visual imaginations of the planet — the way we envisage our planet through concepts, theories, maps, paintings, photographs, videos, buildings and architectural drawings, computer models, graphs, books, and other cultural artifacts. Studying and comparing different kinds of these imaginations, as well as preparing their alternative articulation, belongs to a philosophical endeavour that might be after science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson called comparative planetology.⁵

Despite what he meant by this term having more to do with comparing different celestial bodies in terms of the composition of their atmosphere or soil, I would like to direct this quest into the properly philosophical realm, following the conviction that our models, concepts, and visions of Earth itself need thorough comparative study first.⁶ In this realm, comparative planetology turns out to be more than just a description of different conceptions of the planet — it maps these imaginations on to geopolitical space. In other words: imaginations of the planet reflect different geopolitical arrangements, and — following the thesis on politics-to-come — these geopolitical spaces crucially translate into different geophysical and biochemical realities on the planetary scale. Comparative planetology thus allows us to ask questions such as For what Earth do we design? or What geopolitical tendencies does our imagination of Earth endorse?

Comparative planetology contributes to an emergence of a solid theoretical conceptualisation of the planet in contemporary thinking about politics, media, design, and architecture. We increasingly refer to planetary entanglements, planetary conditions, the planetary ecosystem, planetary-scale computation, planetary megacities, and so on; but closely scrutinised, we discover how these rhetorical gestures might in some cases turn out to be vacuous, especially once they turn into common currency in intellectual cultures. There is already a body of work related to contemporary conceptualisations of the planet, spanning Lynn Margullis’ and James Lovelock’s Gaia (recently reinterpreted by Bruno Latour) through treatises of contemporary philosophers (Ray Brassier, Eugene Thacker, Ben Woodard); from recent updates on the conceptualisations of the planet by Peter Sloterdijk, Jennifer Gabrys, Benjamin Bratton, and William Connolly, to the works of anthropologists and post-colonial thinkers such as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Achille Mbembe, or Anna Tsing. Comparative planetology compares existing intuitive conceptions of the planet and proposes new ones, while simultaneously building a framework instructive for political, design, and architectural interventions.

Infrastructural geopolitics of planetary coordination

The need for a different imagination of Earth is motivated by the urgent political implications of the climate emergency, and above all the lack of technique for planetary coordination of climate emergency mitigation. It becomes clear that the climate crisis is not simply a political problem — it is, properly speaking, a geopolitical affair since it transcends nation state boundaries both in its causes and effects.⁷ However, as we have repeatedly seen since Rio 1992 (and even despite Paris 2015), attempts to coordinate climate emergency mitigation do not reach satisfactory results. The most recent conferences — the December 2018 COP24 in Katowice and the September 2019 UN Climate Action Summit in New York — prove this point: the unsatisfactory results demonstrate an inability on the part of the international community to bring mitigation efforts into practice. For this reason, it might be time to reconsider whether the geopolitical dimension of the climate crisis should not be rendered anew. This can mean — among other things — reassessing the role of nation states as sovereign actors of ecological geopolitics, given that the