Introduction to Comparative Planetology

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...