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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 hollowing out of their functions the last 30–40 years of wild neoliberalisation has led to a situation in which they lack the instruments for planetary coordination (with one major exception, which is their military power). So how should the climate crisis be perceived outside of the geopolitical space of nation states?

The alternative geopolitical space of comparative planetology is infrastructure space. Any orchestration of a large collection of humans and nonhumans requires an infrastructural power based on deploying large-scale socio-economic technologies that operate as active forms that standardise tendencies and regimes of engagement between bodies in space:8 postal address systems, languages and scripts, railways, transoceanic cables, calendars, time zones, international business standards, sewage systems, broadband and water pipes, websites, cloud platforms, and distributed ledgers. We can better understand the power of infrastructures if we recall Giorgio Agamben’s analysis of apparatuses (the English translation of the French term dispositif frequently used by Michel Foucault) as “anything that has in some way the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control, or secure the gestures, behaviors, opinions, or discourses of living beings.”9

To mobilise this kind of infrastructural power in relation to climate emergency mitigation, we need however to understand anew the geo in geopolitical; neglecting the Westphalian conditions that give rise to the situation of globalisation (named after the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, which instituted an international order of sovereign nation states in Europe). Under these conditions, nation states are treated as subjects of global action, while they are actually losing the capacity to control global affairs, and infrastructures are seen as shady mechanisms in the background of geopolitics. We need to flip the figure and the background, and recognise infrastructures as one of the major planetary agencies we have at our disposal, as they can intervene where nation states alone fail. But before doing so, we must make clear what actually is the object we aim to save from runaway climate catastrophe — i.e. what we talk about when we discuss the planet. That is the business of comparative planetology as a philosophical genre.

Figures of the whole: Planetary cosmograms

Why turn the question of what the planet means today into a philosophical problem? Why search for a philosophical concept of the planet as the foundation of climate emergency geopolitics? According to Czech philosopher Jan Patočka, the problem of philosophy is “the world as a whole”10; it is exactly this thinking about “the world as a whole” that in the situation of climate emergency becomes an inquiry into the conditions of our planetary existence. This means that, today, “the world as a whole” is the planet. Moreover, drawing from Carl Schmitt’s argument that geopolitics is possible only after the figure of Earth as a whole becomes the locus of legal spatial ordering,11 one can claim that geopolitics is always in need of the figure of the whole — the planetary imagination — and philosophy as a discipline has the means to deliver it.12

The planetary imagination is largely shaped these days by infrastructures of climate sensing and modelling, or space exploration. While focusing on these infrastructures, comparative planetology underscores how they become much more than just a means of representing Earth — they are also central to the governance of planetary affairs. Comparative planetology thus concerns both the material history of images and the material history of ideas, together with their geopolitical mappings. It clusters these imaginations under coherent figures, such as the Globe, the Terrestrial, or the Planetary. The first of these figures — the Globe — provides a visual metaphor of Earth as a perfectly smooth sphere, enabling horizontal segmentation of its surfaces. Born as a philosophical idea in ancient Greece and a basis of the modern geopolitical order, it is approached by comparative planetology as the prevailing Western conceptualisation of the planet. The figure of the Terrestrial stands in opposition to the Globe, the combination of various visual, philosophical, and (geo)political revolts against globalist ways of imagining Earth. Among these attempts, a prominent concept is Gaia, which suggests focusing on the life-support systems of the planetary assemblage, or even treating the planet as a giant super-organism. Lastly, the Planetary is juxtaposed with both the Globe and the Terrestrial, overcoming theoretical, political, and ecological obstacles emerging from these conceptualisations, and instead treating the planet as a geophysical, impersonal process.

The Planetary stands for the central contemporary figure of comparative planetology, allowing us to break with the troubling historical tradition of the Globe (and the secessionist traction of the Terrestrial) and develop visions of a future Earth that might render anew our present approach to climate emergency. One of these visions is the figure of Earth-without-us, which serves as a normative template for political and design interventions that might become the vectors of an upcoming period of post-Anthropocene. The second figure based on the Planetary that comparative planetology formulates is Spectral Earth, addressing our relation to extinction and species-being. Both Earth-without-us and Spectral Earth allow us to address the geopolitical dimension of climate emergency in relation to our visual and philosophical imagination of the planet without referring to figures drawn from colonial histories or reactionary, identitarian tendencies in contemporary geopolitics.

Inasmuch as each genre of geopolitics deploys some figure of the planet, comparative planetology falls within the scope of the larger philosophical discipline of cosmology13 — the study of the metaphysical organisation of the universe. Each figure of the planet represents a cosmogram14 — a model of a metaphysical organisation, a little planetarium of relations. As architectural, visual, or discursive techniques, cosmograms present the totality of the metaphysical realm in a concrete form, establishing “the relation between different domains or ontological levels.”15 From Buddhist thangkas to orthodox Christian icons and the cosmological drawings of ancient Greek philosophers, they serve as tangible compressions of cosmological orders that people believe themselves to inhabit. John Tresch’s paradigmatic example is the Old Testament’s Tabernacle — a portable, deployable temple accompanied by detailed technical instructions that turn the temple into a representation of the totality of the relations between God and the world, as well as intra-worldly relations.16 Dealing with planetary cosmograms, comparative planetology thus studies particular geo-logies, or geo-logics — the logics intrinsic to different ways the planet might be, given the metaphysical relations projected by this or that figure.

Abstraction at scale

In constructing a planetary perspective, comparative planetology acknowledges that “to shrink solutions to the level of the private and the small is evasive, even if it does constructively enhance one’s sense of agency.”17 Small is beautiful, but without denouncing the localism of many environmental movements, beauty is not what we are after here:18 we face the ugly reality of planetary-scale ecological disaster, one that is falling unevenly on the world’s underprivileged and dispossessed populations. Hence, appeals by some contemporary writers to localise environmental conflicts or attribute responsibility to individuals (crony capitalists, CEOs of multinational corporations, corrupt politicians, Trump, and other incarnations of evil, etc.) sometimes prove to be inconsequential.19 If the climate crisis is a geopolitical problem, a suitable arena in which to deal with its reality is transnational, institutional, and — as comparative planetology argues — predominantly infrastructural.

One last remark before we take off on our planetary flyby: while abstractions of Earth have been rightfully criticised by thinkers such as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak,20 comparative planetology addresses the problem of abstraction with more nuance, acknowledging that some abstractions are better than others. It is certainly true that many of these abstractions have in the past been accompanied by alienation and violence. Yet, comparative planetology appropriates the force of abstraction as a navigational tool for the reconstruction of our planetary imaginations and the production of new cosmograms. Political and design interventions are nothing but hollow and arbitrary if they are not tethered to an abstract dimension in which concepts emerge, mutate, evolve, and mix their meanings and flavours, thus providing crucial transitory mechanisms towards new, unorthodox models for dealing with the world in which we live. In our attempts to wrestle with the reality of the new normal, disposing of abstraction is to throw the steering wheel out of the window in a high-speed race.

Acknowledgements

I. Introduction: The geo of the geopolitical