Planetary

= book, artistic event, and concept

The Book

* Book: The Planetary. Edited by Nils Gilman. Berggruen Press, 2024

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"Complement the Berggruen Institute’s Planetary Summit at Palazzo Diedo in Venice, Italy. At the summit, ideas from this inaugural book were discussed by a wide range of participants from across the globe. The collection of essays explores the paradigm shift from thinking of the world through the lens of the nation-state and globalization to its re-conceptualization as one self-organizing Earth organism — the planet."

(https://www.noemamag.com/announcing-the-berggruen-press/)

The concept

Discussion by Benjamin Bratton:

"The scientific idea of “climate change” is an epistemological accomplishment of planetary-scale computation. The multiscalar and accelerating rate of change is knowable because of data gleaned from satellites, surface and ocean temperatures, and most of all models derived from supercomputing simulations of the planetary past, present, and futures. As such, computation has made the contemporary notions of the “Planetary” and the “Anthropocene” conceivable, accountable, and actionable. These ideas, in turn, established that over the past centuries, anthropogenic agency has had terraforming-scale effects. Every discipline is reckoning in its own way with the implications of this; some better than others.

As the Planetary is now accepted as a “humanist category,” it is worth emphasizing that the actual planets, including Earth, are rendered as stable objects of knowledge that have been made legible largely through first-order insights gleaned from computational perceptual technologies. It becomes a humanist category both as a motivating idea that puts the assembly of those technologies in motion and, later, as a (precious) second-order abstraction derived from what they show us.

The Planetary is a term with considerable potential philosophical weight but also a lot of gestural emptiness. It is, as suggested, both a cause and an effect of the recognition of “the Anthropocene.” But what is that? I say “recognition” because the Anthropocene was occurring long before it was deduced to be happening. Whether you start at the beginning of agriculture ten thousand years ago or the Industrial Revolution a few hundred years ago, or the pervasive scattering of radioactive elements more recently, the anthropogenic transformation of the planet was an “accidental terraforming.” It was not the plan.

After years of debate as to whether the term deserves the status of proper geologic epoch, the most recent decision is to identify the Anthropocene as an event, as the Great Oxidation is an event or the Chtulam meteor is an event. This introduces more plasticity into the concept. Events are unsettled and transformative but not necessarily final. Anthropogenic agency can and likely will orient this event to a more deliberate conclusion. For its part, computation will surely make this orientation possible, just as it made legible the situation in which it moves."

(https://research.antikythera.org/)

More information

See also: Planetarity: "Next up is a collection of the winning essays from the 2024 Berggruen Prize Essay Competition, also on the topic of “planetarity.” Each essay will be translated into both English and Chinese and presented in the tête-bêche style by the design team at the Press." [1]