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Cosmic Terrains (of the Sun King, Son of Heaven, and Sovereign of the Seas) - Journal #114

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“Zodial Sphere and Celestial Globe, Observatory, Beijing,” 1873, from Illustrations of China and Its People: A Series of Two-Hundred Photographs, with Letterpress Descriptive of the Places and People Represented, J. Thomson, F.R.G.S. Credit: Wellcome Collection/CC BY 4.0. In 1966 Stewart Brand printed buttons asking, “Why haven’t we seen a photograph of the whole Earth yet?” He thought the photo would transform politics and everyday life by sparking recognition of the feedbacks of our social and ecological systems. Once NASA released photos of “Earthrise” and the iconic “Blue Marble,” Brand put them on the cover of The Whole Earth Catalog. Bruno Latour and Dipesh Chakrabarty’s conversation about “Conflicts of Planetary Proportions” raises a demand not far from Brand’s.1 In 2020—as wildfires burn, demagogues fume, refugees clutch at rafts, and new viruses stalk the species—our vision of the earth needs revision. The planet is now shattered into an array of “planetarities”: the globe of

e - flux Journal Subscribe Cosmic Terrains (of the Sun King, Son of Heaven, and Sovereign of the Seas) John Tresch Issue # 114 December 2020 ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ Notes 1 Bruno Latour and Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Conflicts of Planetary Proportions—a Conversation,” in “Historical Thinking and the Human,” ed. Marek Tamm and Zoltán Boldizsár Simon, special issue, Journal of the Philosophy of History 14, no. 3 (2020). 2 Latour and Chakrabarty, “Conflicts of Planetary Proportions.” 3 Benjamin Lazier, “Earthrise; or, the Globalization of the World Picture,” American Historical Review 116, no. 3 (2011): 60

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