#planetarity

[bustakay]

Global history enters nature; global nature enters history: this is something utterly new in philosophy.

Michel Serres, Contract, 17. 

[raykettle]

[lasmaracuyas]

[H]ow can I know difference in ways that do not prescribe otherness in my own terms? We might think here of other ways of knowing and being that are at first radically incompatible with the Apollonian image and cosmos: aboriginal animism, Buddhist attainments of non-selfhood, or Sufi mysticism. Moreover, we might think of the sheer inadequacy of the conceptual languages intuitively available to us to grasp these formations on terms true to the singularity of those differences. To write about ‘Buddhist attainments of non-selfhood’, for example, is to speak from an ontological starting point that takes liberal and Cartesian notions of the atomized, rational self for granted. It is to invest in a world of ‘nature and culture’, ‘subjects and objects’, where such a language is unable to comprehend the ontological reality of the Buddhist (non)subject on its own terms, a (non)subject which itself is inseparable from a metaphysical universe composed of energy (dhamma) (see Jazeel, 2005). 

The point that planetarity stresses is that such worldings do not lend themselves to mere incorporation, or toleration, by a dominant cosmopolitan imagination. Furthermore, such other worldings may also in fact equally instantiate their own universals that radically destabilize the primacy of cosmopolitanism itself, perhaps in the process instantiating their own power geometries. In short, the challenge planetarity poses is the work of grasping the aesthetics and actualities of incommensurable differences from their own insides out, because it is that hard and uncertain work without guarantees that decentres the ‘we’ beholden to the cosmopolitan dream of a rationally knowable universality. In this sense, unlearning is a crucial part of the work that planetarity demands, and unlearning cosmopolitanism is one such step toward more egalitarian modes of living together.

T. Jazeel “Rethinking Planetary Futures”

[lasmaracuyas]

This is why I quoted Laurie Anderson who had said the same thing with the typical vanity of the auteur-artiste. When she was artist in residence at NASA, she liked it, she said, because, in the context of space, “human beings are worms”. I contrast this to my dear friend Paul Gilroy talking about planetarity and one worldness. He quotes someone from that first moon voyage who says that from the moon looking at the earth all around with no people there at all, it is possible to think that we are one world. Why do we fight among nations? Paul himself is impeccable in his politics but what he pushes here is the good ideological froth on US manifest destiny beer. As I was waiting outside, I heard a young geographer speaking to another young geographer, complaining about some international conference in some “benighted” place in the world: “You know they didn’t put a bed sheet on the other twin bed because I was just renting a single room.” The woman says “You should have told them we are Americans; we are used to bigger beds.” I thought this is what tells us about the politics and the discipline of geography, not a room full of radicals who want to listen to me. 

"Scattered Speculations on Geography," Gayatri C. Spivak

"the good ideological froth on US manifest destiny beer"