On the way to planet politics: from disciplinary demise to cosmopolitical coordination

Abstract

From climatic chaos to mass extinction, from ‘geoengineering’ to unprecedented urbanisation, world politics has, in recent decades, become inescapably planetary. Recent discussions concerning ‘Planet Politics’ are, therefore, timely. However, the debate, to date, has been limited by a number of conceptual and political problems. In particular, an apparent disinclination to address serious differences as regards the authority of natural scientific knowledge with respect to collective ontologies raises the question of what is truly political in planetary politics. Drawing on Gayatri Spivak’s concept of ‘planetarity’ and Isabelle Stengers’ ‘cosmopolitics’, this intervention consists of a diagnosis, a method and an alternative. The diagnosis is that this debate has yet to constitute a workable starting point for the very thought processes, and political processes, that those involved demand. The method is simultaneously ‘forensic’ and ‘diplomatic’ – that is, it focuses on bringing undisclosed and semi-disclosed conflicts into the open while, furthermore, ‘thinking through the middle’ of established polemical positions, enabling new possibilities. The alternative, then, proposes to distinguish a cosmopolitan agenda of global connectedness from a cosmopolitical process of situated coordination. Finally, it is argued that adding ‘planetary’ to our politics aptly, if counterintuitively, encapsulates the condition of ‘political multiplicity’. However, rather than lending weight to disciplinary consolidation, this encapsulation should serve to forge connections with problems of multiplicity of all sorts. That is, the purpose of planetary politics, as conceived herein, would be that of inventing speculative practices that maintain the possibility of unlikely alliances between disparate powers, and not only those of the nation state.