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

Introduction

As an agenda for research, collaboration, agitation and institutional reconstruction, recent debates concerning ‘Planet Politics’ could not be more timely. ¹ In Planet Politics: A Manifesto from the End of IR, ² co-authors Anthony Burke, Stefanie Fishel, Audra Mitchell, Simon Dalby and Daniel Levine summarily declare that ‘International Relations, as both a field of knowledge and a global system of institutions, is failing the planet’. ³ Hitherto blinkered by the spatial-ontological scale of the international, the discipline is thus challenged ‘to reorganise its very foundations’ ⁴ and to embrace a politics of the planetary.

Such declarations have not been uncontroversial. ⁵ Most conspicuously, in a response article, David Chandler, Erika Cudworth and Stephen Hobden excoriate what they see as ‘an elitist and managerialist assault on the political imagination’. ⁶ Far from setting out a bold, world-making vision, the Manifesto is instead characterised as a depoliticised apologia: a ‘global cosmopolitanism’ in the vein of ‘David Held and Tony Blair’, armed to the teeth with éminence grise, promoting yet another ‘global liberal mission’. ⁷

Drawing on Gayatri Spivak’s concept of ‘planetarity’, and Isabelle Stengers’ ‘cosmopolitics’, my intervention to this debate consists of a diagnosis, a method and an alternative. The diagnosis is that while International Relations (IR), as both field and system, may well be ‘failing the planet’, and while the Manifesto has succeeded in stoking discussions in this regard, this text has itself failed to constitute a workable starting point for the debate it demands. In particular, its fusion of Earth system-based cosmopolitan governance with an ethos of allyship concerning situated and historically subjugated knowledges is, at best, discordant. However, pace Chandler et al., I take this failure to demand not scorn and condemnation but scrutiny and reconstruction. The Manifesto does indeed identify crucial intersections for our moment, even as, I argue, it gets lost at the crossroads.

The method herein employed is simultaneously forensic and diplomatic. It is forensic in both the etymological sense of forensis – relating to a forum or place of public assembly – and in the sense of close, detailed scrutinising. That is, its objective is to make open and apparent the problems at issue. It is diplomatic in the sense developed by Stengers. ⁸ That is, its objective is to ‘think through the middle’ of established polemical positions, enabling new possibilities. ⁹ The alternative, finally, proposes to fundamentally distinguish a cosmopolitan agenda of global connectedness from a cosmopolitical process of situated coordination.

The following, therefore: (1) elaborates upon the above; (2) explicates the concepts of planetarity and diplomacy; (3) forensically analyses the tangled intertext surrounding the Manifesto; (4) diplomatically rearticulates major lines of controversy; (5) explicates Stengers’ cosmopolitics, as distinct from the cosmopolitanism of Burke et al.; and (6) concludes by proposing a cosmopolitical planet politics. In short, this would be a politics requiring the invention of speculative intellectual and political practices that maintain the possibility of unlikely alliances, not only between nations but between planetary agents of all sorts.

Overwriting the globe

Not for but from ‘the end of IR’, Burke et al. issue us an invitation – to participate in ‘a new global political project: to end human-caused extinctions, prevent dangerous climate change, save the oceans, support vulnerable multi-species populations, and restore social justice’. ¹⁰ However, for Chandler et al., this is not so much a brave new world as a revanchist ruse: ‘Just when it seemed that global cosmopolitanism could find no way back’ after Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and so on, ¹¹ the liberal unconscious finds its new medium: the planetary. Whether read as insinuating complicity with war crimes or simply pegging its foes to an outdated paradigm, this is a critique that amounts to a denunciation.

Renouncing this ‘bizarre association’, the manifestographers’ response has, perhaps unsurprisingly, been similarly frosty. ¹² Chandler et al. did not, they argue, substantively engage with their work but, rather, mauled ‘a virtual text of their own invention’. Indeed, by ‘tendentiously’ homogenising the Manifesto ‘under the term “liberalism”’, the critics blithely disregarded its constitutive pluralism, bringing together, as it did, ‘posthumanism, new materialisms, Earth system theory, and anti-colonialism – even the much-maligned cosmopolitanism’ ¹³ under a ‘capacious umbrella’. ¹⁴

The premise of the following is that these texts – Manifesto, critique and rejoinder – constitute an intertext that is of significance beyond the circumstances of their composition. Their constitutive lines of controversy are symptomatic of the complex conflicts facing any who approach such intellectual and political intersections. But from where might an alternative emerge?

‘The planet’, writes Gayatri Spivak in Death of a Discipline, ‘is easily claimed’. ¹⁵ That is, whether the agenda is to save, to survey or to exploit, the planet is easily taken as a ground of collective commonality. The discipline to which Spivak referred was that of comparative literature, then (in 2003) undergoing a ‘sea change’, having passed through the globalist optimism of the 1990s into the early days of the so-called Global War on Terror’s enlistment of cultural expertise in a new project of empire. In the teeth of such travesties, Spivak argued for ‘a new comparative literature’, premised not upon globality but upon the concept of ‘planetarity’. ¹⁶ Thus, she writes, ‘I propose the planet to overwrite the globe’. ¹⁷

However, planetarity does not claim the planetary in ecological or Earth-systemic terms. Indeed, Spivak is expressly uninterested in the ‘contemporary planet-talk’ of environmentalism, which, she comments, tends towards a ‘dogmatic’, naturalistic translation of capitalist globality, ‘susceptible to nation-state geopolitics’. Conversely, Spivak invites us to ‘think critically – via Kant’, binding our thought ‘to the subjective conditions of envisioning planetarity, without undertaking to decide anything about its object’. Rendered thus, we realise that ‘planetarity is not susceptible to the subject’s grasp’. ¹⁸ In contrast to the globe, where ‘[n]o one lives’, Spivak’s planet is indeed inhabited but only ‘on loan’. ¹⁹ Much like the Kantian sublime, it overwhelms all adventures of the imagination. However, its significance is not simply aesthetic. Rather, planetarity prompts the insistence that ‘alterity remains underived from us’; that ‘it is not our dialectical negation’ – and, hence, other modes of inter-collective coexistence are possible than resentment and domination.

By distinguishing that which subtends ‘global agents’ within their environment from that which intends ‘planetary subjects’ towards one another, ²⁰ planetarity conceptually confounds the erasure of politics by governance. However, this comes at a high price: subjective abstraction from all terrestrial specificity, materiality or agency. It is important, then, that Spivak does not altogether renounce the ‘sense of accountability’ or custodianship that the environmental rendering of the planetary entails. She adds, parenthetically: ‘(For that custodial sense a good epistemological preparation can be undertaken by way of Isabelle Stengers’s Cosmopolitics)’. ²¹ A fine preparation, indeed; however, one that strains at Spivak’s neo-Kantian subject-constraints.

For Stengers, as for Gilles Deleuze, Immanuel Kant is rather more ‘an enemy’ than an ally. ²² What she calls ‘the intrusion of Gaia’ relates not to the finite rationality of any transcendental subjectivity. ²³ Nor is it an enigmatic, overwhelming, phenomenological spectacle. Nor, however, is Gaia-the-intruder straightforwardly a figure of the natural or geographical sciences. While deriving from the work of James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis, ²⁴ and naming the entity that ‘climatologists are discovering as prone to global mutations’, Gaia must not imply a unifying planetary realm underpinning the hypostasised anthropos of the Anthropocene. ‘Climate disorder may well concern all inhabitants of the earth, but the term intrusion specifically designates “us”’. ²⁵ To paraphrase, Gaia-the-intruder designates an event of interruption that has significance for any given terrestrial being relative to the involvement of that being in, and dependence of that being on, the collective processes perturbatorily productive of the intrusion. It is a figure forced neither upon all humans nor all earthlings. ²⁶ Nevertheless, it is a figure whose force impinges upon far more than the imagination.

Thus considered, Stengers’ work provides not so much ‘epistemological preparation’ as ontological – that is, it concerns the conditions for the existential reception of beings that exceed those who receive them; conditions that do not simply overlap with the production of knowledge or the preconditions of rationality. Her ‘cosmopolitics’ could, then, be understood as the politics of such conditioning. ²⁷ However, this concept should not be hastily generalised (as do Burke et al.). Nor, above all, must it be conflated (as the co-authors do also) with the cosmopolitan – the ideal order relatable to all by fiat of transcendental imperative. And so, rather than taking the planet qua Earth system as the ground of a new epoch of global governance and resistance, and rather than rejecting the concept altogether, planet politics might instead be reconstructed in terms of planetarity. However, and moreover, rather than accepting transcendental abstraction from all terrestrial specificity, it might further be remade in terms of Gaian cosmopolitics.

As such, the following attempts an intercession, endeavouring to ‘think through the middle’ (or ‘penser par le milieu’) of the polemical positions. ²⁸ This ‘diplomacy’, taken abstractly, entails a practice that commits itself to transforming ‘contradictions’ into ‘contrasts’. ²⁹ It engages conflicting ‘powers’, formulating alternative articulations of their fundamental concerns in a manner that might bring such parties, were they to ‘define themselves as capable of participating in its invention’, ³⁰ to a point of resolution, hence raising the possibility (if not the probability) of collective coordination. ³¹

This is not, therefore, a ‘disinterested’ mediation, nor is the analysis comprehensive. Moreover, the forensic judgement of ‘failure’ being a critical act par excellence, the following is not, therefore, ‘post-critical’ as such. ³² However, it aims to be ‘more-than-critical’. Whatever the varied connotations of ‘diplomatic’, its objective, here, is not reconciliation, agreement or even dialogue as such. Rather, it simply seeks to practice what it proposes: enacting planet politics.

Contradictions and contrasts

Fundamental to the dispute in question are differences concerning the legitimate role of scholarship in relation to governance. For the manifestographers, ³³ planet politics encompasses practices of both ‘governance and of subversion, of regulation and resistance’. Accordingly, it requires ‘amplifying marginalised voices and creating new forms of solidarity and governance’ in the face of ‘big energy, big farming, big finance, and fossil fuel capitalism’, ³⁴ while at the same time advocating a ‘universal legal framework’ through which states may end coal power and transform their energy economies. ³⁵ In an online forum further to the Manifesto, published in May 2017, Burke adds that this kind of politics is intended to build ‘a community of intellectuals, activists and governors around the Planet’. ³⁶ By contrast, the critics affirm that they have no intention of engaging in ‘the debate on the policy-making terms set by Burke et al.’ ³⁷ and renounce any such cosying up to the powers that be. While, in the aforementioned forum, Fishel complains that her project has been repeatedly dismissed as ‘utopic, hopeful and completely naïve’, for Chandler et al., it is apparently not naïvely utopian enough.

The very first paragraph of the Manifesto affirms that: ‘To survive, we must ask questions that are intimately connected to capitalism, modernity, and oppression’. ³⁸ Later, it reiterates that ‘we do not have a coal problem, we have a capitalism problem’. ³⁹ While certainly, therefore, recognising the planet-mulching effects of the prevailing economic order, for its critics such affirmations fall far short. ⁴⁰ The problem, they write, is that so long as such reforms are submitted under capitalism, ‘they would only be used selectively to reinforce dominant power relations’ ⁴¹ – a classic critical conundrum.

While Burke et al. are as eager to denounce capitalism as the next critical theorist, they neither offer an analysis of its functioning nor consider the processes of capture and subsumption that permit the resilient order to incorporate its own opposition. In their rejoinder, the co-authors agree that the Anthropocene ‘is certainly driven by capitalism, whose causal powers must be placed under critique’. However, they add that the seeds of Anthropocenic change were ‘planted long before the rise of global capitalism’, with longer historical trajectories ‘including European colonialism’ also being integral. ⁴² Nevertheless, the anti-capitalism that the co-authors countenance is of quite a particular kind. Rather than plotting to depose capitalism, they deplore it. ⁴³ And so, to gloss Chandler et al.’s case against the Manifesto, perhaps a little crudely: Needs more Marxism.

Likewise, institutionally, the Manifesto does not repudiate disciplinary structures so much as replace them. Whereas Chandler et al. claim to condemn IR’s disciplinarity at its core, ⁴⁴ Burke et al. are eager to reassure readers that babies will not be discarded with bathwaters. ⁴⁵ Indeed, interdisciplinarity aside, it seems that, in this utopia, the basic institutional form of IR would remain largely intact. ⁴⁶ In their rejoinder, the co-authors begin with a bold (and seemingly controvertible) claim: ‘Most would agree that IR is constellated around the question of survival first and foremost’. Given this predisposition, IR should, therefore, be among the most qualified disciplines to handle issues of climatic chaos, geologic upheaval and mass extinction. ⁴⁷ If only disciplinary somnambulists could move past their retrograde and superfluous intellectual confinements and embrace ‘the planetary real’, ⁴⁸ this fearsome future could, at least, be professionally fortuitous. IR is dead, long live IR.

However, Chandler et al. do not content themselves with impugning Burke et al.’s claims to radicalism. As we have seen, they also impute the Manifesto’s mission to the shallowly interred agenda of Held and Blair:

Burke et al. spend no time considering what new violences are afforded and enabled in their call for new global governance bodies to ‘enforce and penalise violence – slow and fast – against nonhuman communities and ecologies’ [. . .]. ⁴⁹

In other words, this burgeoning planetary order, with its glossy new legal frameworks, is presumed to endorse a renascent stage of global imperialist military force. Fishel et al. deny this entirely:

there is nothing in the Manifesto to indicate that we would support the use of military violence or any other form of lawless coercion in defence of the environment. ⁵⁰

Of course, ‘the use of military violence’ is not necessarily a ‘form of lawless coercion’ (since it can be legally sanctioned). However, the claim that the Manifesto did not openly endorse military force in support of global governance is correct. Nevertheless, it is altogether unclear what power is supposed to uphold such globe-spanning frameworks, beyond good will and planetary necessity.

It is fair to add that Chandler et al. do rather more than simply ‘read between the lines’ in projecting such militaristic underpinnings. They leap immediately, and rather pugnaciously, to their conclusions, allowing no possibility that the ambiguity of Burke et al.’s proposals might be resolved in any other way. Such a mode of freely imputative critique is hardly unusual (indeed, the manifestographers practice it themselves). However, from the perspective of those critiqued, the gap between what has been said and what has been concluded can seem arbitrary, tendentious and hostile.

However, whatever the shortcomings of imputative inference, the Manifesto itself is by no means constructed in such a way as to facilitate charitable readings. In response to the critics’ claim that their text ‘makes for a confused read’, ⁵¹ Fishel et al. reply that their opponents’ critique betrays a ‘discomfort with multiplicity’. This contention is, I think, crucial:

What they appear to find so confusing is the polyvocality of the piece, one written by five authors embedded within distinct backgrounds, contexts, approaches and normative commitments. ⁵²

It should be reiterated that the text in question is, not only titularly but substantively, presented as a manifesto in the singular. That is, ‘polyvocality’ is in no way an explicit feature of its construction. ⁵³ For anyone familiar with the five co-authors’ respective œuvres, some of the Manifesto’s sub-sections are clearly written by distinct hands, as they focus on each contributor’s areas of research and reflect their authorial voices (as, for that matter, does the text of their critics). However, the Manifesto does not openly distinguish areas of authorship. Nor, perhaps more importantly, are disagreements between the co-authors made explicit.

Among the more vociferous repudiations of the criticisms levelled by Chandler et al. concerns the issue of Indigenous cosmologies. In the Manifesto, Burke et al. wrote:

The planet is telling us that there are limits to human freedom; there are freedoms and political choices we can no longer have. ⁵⁴

Such a pronouncement, Chandler et al. went on to lament, ‘would be comical’ were it not presented ‘as a serious suggestion by well published and internationally respected critical theorists’. ⁵⁵ In their rejoinder, the manifestographers then replied that the refusal of their critics ‘to accept the literalism of the suggestion that the Earth and its multiple worlds can be political actors’ is ‘an assumption often made by colonial thinkers in relation to Indigenous knowledge systems’. ⁵⁶ In other words, Chandler et al.’s incredulity displayed precisely the colonial attitude that planet politics is to undo.

Of course, ‘the planet is telling us that there are limits to human freedom’ and ‘the Earth and its multiple worlds can be political actors’ are not equivalent statements (and Chandler et al. may well accept the latter). However, the second, and more important, point is that the question of Indigenous cosmologies is raised within the Manifesto only once: ⁵⁷

Beyond reducing life to forms to capital [sic], currencies and financial instruments, the dominant neoliberal political economy of conservation imposes a homogenising, Western secular worldview on a planetary phenomenon. Yet the enormity, complexity, and scale of mass extinction is so huge that humans need to draw on every possible resource in order to find ways of responding. This means that they need to mobilise multiple worldviews and lifeways – including those emerging from indigenous and marginalised cosmologies.

This is on page 517 (i.e. page 19 of 25). The passage on ‘the planet is telling us’ is from page 507 (9 of 25), at the end of a series of remarks on the Anthropocene. Which ‘vocality’, then, are these statements to be legitimately read in relation to?

The rejoinder, in marked contrast to the Manifesto itself, expands at some length on the topic, affirming that planet politics ‘honours a 500 year tradition of Indigenous refusal of colonial violence and environmental racism – the politics of Standing Rock – as a source of radical change oriented towards the survival of the Earth’s life forms’. ⁵⁸ It also now identifies authors openly (though without implying any dissent or disagreement):

As Mitchell has argued elsewhere – including in public follow-ups to the Manifesto ⁵⁹ – her contribution affirms the idea that earth and the multiple worlds it sustains are agents that engage in critique by laying bare the gap between dominant politics and their own realities. This idea is rooted in plural Indigenous philosophical systems in which, for instance, land and humans engage in co-thinking and constant communication; in which Country tells its human kin how and when to engage in activities such as burning brush/waste or fishing; and in which mountains/earth-/tirakuna ⁶⁰ actively shape politics.

Chandler et al.’s dismissal of ‘the agencies of earth and the plural world it fosters’ thus demonstrates an ignorance and lack of respect ‘for cosmo-visions that embrace the agency of earth and other beings’, leading to ‘a deeply colonial re-assertion of Western secular cosmo-visions and narratives’. ⁶¹

Such affirmations of allyship are clearly sincere and well-considered. However, to defend the Manifesto’s statement ‘the planet is telling us . . .’ by appeal to ‘Indigenous philosophical systems’ is rather disingenuous. Indigenous thought was alluded to only briefly, and in a completely different part of the text – a text that was pointedly announced, subsequently, to be ‘polyvocal’. In the rejoinder, it is claimed that the Manifesto ‘clearly lay[s] out the basis of this ethics in attunement to the plurality of worlds’, furthermore indicating ‘Indigenous philosophies as alternative ways of worlding’. ⁶² And, true, the section in question that articulated the concept of ‘worlding’ followed straight on from that which mentioned ‘indigenous and marginalised cosmologies’. ⁶³ However, this concept was articulated not with reference to Indigenous thinkers but, rather, to Martin Heidegger and Jean-Luc Nancy. Perhaps the absence of further citations was simply an oversight or due to constraint of space. However, in any case, the pressing point is what this post hoc justification says with regard to the internal politics of the Manifesto.

While Indigenous philosophies are given little more than a sentence, large parts of the text are given over to Earth system science (ESS) – a transdisciplinary programme of planetary sensing and modelling developed at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in the 1980s. ⁶⁴ In particular, pages 505–506 contrast IR (unfavourably) with ESS, the latter being distinguished by its addressing ‘the true scale and systemic complexity of the planet’ (recall that ‘the planet is telling us . . .’ appears on page 507). The reason for the Manifesto privileging ESS is obvious: its systematic synthesis of geological, ecological, chemical and physical forces renders the planet a dynamic, resilient totality, providing precisely the universalisable referent ground of its ‘new global political project’. The co-authors are clear that in claiming the notion of ‘a new planetary real’, based upon the natural sciences, they are not endorsing the ‘naïve’ presumption that ‘the findings of those sciences are incontestable’. ⁶⁵ However, explanatory or normative incontestability is far from the only problem that such an invocation of ESS might raise.

The need to further integrate social and natural sciences has been recognised since the very beginning of the ESS programme. ⁶⁶ However, more than three decades later, it remains the case, as one team of Earth system scientists puts it, that ‘human agency, global social and economic networks’ have not yet been ‘dynamically represented’ within existing models. ⁶⁷ Beyond the ‘ontological shock’ ⁶⁸ with which Burke et al. wish to confront the discipline, how, then, might IR scholars practically engage with Earth system scientists in order to address such issues?

As a science-spanning transdisciplinary project of systemic synthesis, ESS is a methodologically complex field. However, with regard to policy-making, of principal importance are Integrated Assessment Models, which relate the complexity of human factors to General Circulation Models. To date, this relation has been formed largely through the incorporation of economic models. ⁶⁹ To be sure, it is also recognised that ‘closing the loop’ between human and natural dynamics ‘means better inclusion of plurality of worldviews, priorities and objectives’. ⁷⁰ However, in terms of the science–policy agenda, as it exists today, it would seem that the IR scholars best placed to ‘close the loop’ with regard to the inter-polity dynamics of the total Earth system are those employing quantitative, model-based methods derived from economics – that is, precisely the school usually understood as being the ‘mainstream’. What, then, is at its ‘end’?

This is, of course, a limited and schematic overview of the issues and interests involved, and there are other ways to read the relevance of ESS. ⁷¹ However, considered in relation to its genesis at NASA, its formalised operating principles, its prioritisation of economic factors, and whatever its undoubtedly fundamental naturalistic-epistemic importance, ESS seems very much to be a ‘Western secular worldview on a planetary phenomenon’ (as Burke et al. put it of the political economy of conservation). ⁷² Indeed, it is upon precisely this point that differences among the co-authors have become apparent.

In the forum of May 2017, Mitchell writes that, contrary to what the Manifesto may have suggested, ‘there is not one “real,” and it is not the expression of “a” planet’. Moreover, although the ‘Earth system’ conception plainly differs from that of the IR tradition, it also ‘reproduces the idea that there is one, unified planet and that any single worldview can reflect it’. By contrast, her ‘pluriversal’ research engages with ‘Indigenous knowledges and cosmo-visions from across Turtle Island, Australia, Hawai’i, southeast Asia and other distinct places’. Rather than seeking to establish the planet as its referent, then, Mitchell’s work argues for ‘a politics and ethos of co-existence that honours, expresses, protects and nurtures the plurality of worlds’. ⁷³

These are significant disagreements. Fishel et al. may have been proffering multiple ‘possible responses to a multi-dimensional problem’. ⁷⁴ Nevertheless, their neglect of the deep differences – perhaps even contradictions – between their various positions places severe strain upon their agenda. Chandler et al.’s judgement that this is ‘an anti-political manifesto: a call for the abolition of politics’ may be harsh. ⁷⁵ Only parts of the text invoke the necessity of top-down legal-governmental management and this is explicitly, if non-specifically, placed in relation to the necessity of amplifying capacities for contestation. Nevertheless, these disagreements, whatever their genesis, are informative beyond their particularities. Indeed, it is precisely by bringing such differences into vivid contrast, as the above-analysed exchange of polemics has done, that the stakes of planet politics can be understood.

In its initial iteration, planet politics was staked upon seeking a diverse alliance of views and agendas. However, this seems to have come at the cost of concealing the co-authors’ political and intellectual priorities, the explication of which was deferred to a later date and, pushed into a defensive stance by the critique of Chandler et al., has yet to be fully addressed. The question, then, is whether such tensions and conflicts can be worked through.

Problems and proposals

Having now identified the fundaments of the dispute, the following section focuses its analyses on several key points concerning situatedness, contradiction and negotiation.

Worlds in the balance

By bringing together ‘posthumanism, new materialisms, Earth system theory, and anti-colonialism – even the much-maligned cosmopolitanism’, ¹¹² the manifestographers performed a valuable service: they demonstrated both the urgent necessity of working at such an intersection and the considerable problems involved in doing so. I argue their attempts to reconcile these tensions to have fallen short. And so, what other planets politics are possible?

A partial answer has already been given. Neither Spivak’s planetarity nor Stengers’ Gaia-the-intruder can be made the conceptual ground of existing regimes of production and governance. Thus, they resist capture and subsumption, eluding those who Stengers names ‘our guardians [nos responsables]’. ¹¹³ A planet politics taking these as lodestones would not have resolved the question of revolution versus reform, nor of the conditions under which Indigenous philosophies can or should be put into wider circuits of learning and so on. However, it would have made the contestation of such issues cosmopolitically meaningful. It is, therefore, by further formulating the difference between the cosmopolitan and the cosmopolitical that I shall bring things towards a conclusion.

In their Manifesto, Burke et al. equate ‘Planet Politics’ with ‘cosmopolitics’, describing the latter as a politics ‘that admits (many different) humans, nonhumans and things, present, absent, living, inorganic, powerful and less powerful, by making politics receptive to the disturbances they create’. ¹¹⁴ In this, they make no explicit reference to Stengers’ work. However, in their rejoinder, a footnote records that Burke’s work ‘is painstakingly distinguished from liberal internationalism and rooted in a cosmic, rather than humanist, ontology to the point that scholars have asserted it is better understood as a form of “cosmopolitics”’. ¹¹⁵ The one scholar cited to this effect is fellow manifestographer Audra Mitchell and her article Is IR Going Extinct?, which defines cosmopolitics, with due attribution to Stengers, as ‘a politics attuned to the biological, geological and cosmological forces of the universe, [. . .] rooted in the acknowledgement of the multiple, diverse and constantly transforming beings that constitute the cosmos’. ¹¹⁶

This may be a thin connecting thread; however, it is fundamental. While Stengers is evidently interested in ‘making politics receptive to the disturbances’ created by the irruptive interventions of human and nonhuman beings, her conception of cosmopolitics is worlds apart from that of the co-authors’ conception.

Recall that Burke’s cosmos is explicitly that of Sagan’s ‘vast cosmic arena’. ¹¹⁷ Until around 1845, the word ‘cosmos’ had been largely forgotten since antiquity. It was popularised by the Prussian naturalist and statesman Alexander von Humboldt as a synonym for the complete physical universe in his multi-volume magnum opus of popular science, Kosmos (1845–1862). ¹¹⁸ This work, inspired by both the natural sciences of his day and the philosophical idealism of Friedrich Schiller and Immanuel Kant, sought to describe the cosmic totality in a manner both scientifically rigorous and aesthetically enrapturing. ¹¹⁹ This, he was convinced, would inspire a sense of cosmopolitan unity in the expanding liberal nations of the world. It was in much this spirit that, in 1855, Whitman, too, identified himself as ‘an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos’. ¹²⁰

It would seem to be in this lineage, Kant–Humboldt–Sagan, that Burke’s cosmopolitanism, and by extension that of the co-authors who align themselves with him, has been constructed. The ‘cosmic’ and the ‘humanist’ are only at odds within a rather narrow historical attention span.

In Another Science is Possible: A Manifesto for Slow Science, Stengers describes ‘cosmopolitics’ as a name that calls ‘for the invention of modes of gathering that complicate politics by introducing hesitation’. That is, cosmopolitics calls for the interruption of conventions of consideration as regards those entities that may be affected by the collective decision in question but cannot, or wish not to, play any part in its political contestation. ¹²¹ ‘Politics’, then, is not taken as a universal institution. Rather, it is understood in relation to the historical polis:

When political animals gather and discuss what is good or bad for the city, neither gods nor mountains nor forests have a voice in the process. When the city is extended into one cosmopolitan world, it is a world of which humans are citizens, everywhere at home, not a world where many worlds fit. ¹²²

As for ‘politics’, so for ‘cosmos’. Rather than being the pre-given ground that would necessitate and inculcate cosmopolitan unity:

The prefix ‘cosmo-’ aims at making the disruption matter. [. . .] The cosmos is not an argument and nobody can purport to be its spokesperson, but it signals that together with issues, worlds are in the balance. ¹²³

Stengers freely admits that, from other intellectual-political positions, her cosmopolitics will appear ‘badly limited’. ¹²⁴ However, it was not developed as a generalisable framework but, rather, in relation to specific problems: those of the European metropole and their sciences.

Thus, instead of making the cosmos ‘always-already political’, as Mitchell puts it, ¹²⁵ it is the overwhelming indifference of most cosmic constituents to the political that gives cosmo-politics its constitutive tension. ¹²⁶ As such, a cosmopoliticised assembly is one ‘inhabited, even haunted, by those who present themselves as not interested in the creation of partial connections, not forced to think together with the others by the issue’. ¹²⁷ It is not, therefore, through the interconnection but in the interstice – the uncaptured, the unincorporated, the parallel – that the cosmopolitical comes to be. It is for the sake of such unengaged, or unengageable, agents that Stengers affirms the importance of the ‘diplomat’. ¹²⁸ However, a disposition of mediation is a recurrent motif throughout her works.

Addressing the ‘generalised polemic’ ¹²⁹ that has long rumbled between natural scientists and their sociologist critics has, for Stengers, a trained chemist, constituted a career-long concern. However, in her manifesto, she maintains that the world of the natural sciences cannot ignore that its practices and propositions ‘may attack the very fabric of other worlds’. ¹³⁰ Then again, nor can the sciences ignore the susceptibility of their own worldly fabric to patent-hungry rentier capitalism. While certainly concerned, therefore, with the historical complicity of the natural and social sciences in the destruction of other modes of existence, Stengers does not seek to connect with the beings of other collectives, nor to mobilise them in global circuits of respect, understanding and mutual exchange. This is not her cosmopolitics.

Elsewhere, Stengers lays claim to being ‘a daughter of the Enlightenment’ in the precise sense of seeking to inherit from a historical moment when ‘a taste for thinking and for the imagination as exercises in insubordination became widespread’. However, she adds, such self-situating necessitates ‘the question of how to inherit it’; in other words, ‘how to avoid being its rentier, the representative of an established privilege [. . .]’. ¹³¹ And so, while some reclaim Indigenous modes of being from the cosmocidal, genocidal violence of imperialist history, Stengers – ‘a European city dweller, alphabetized to the core’ ¹³² – lays claim to reclaiming the ‘modern’ sciences:

The idea that we belong to a tradition that is doomed to define other peoples as entertaining mere beliefs, or nature as a mere resource, is a very infectious one, which you meet everywhere. It breeds guilt and poisons our capacity to resist, leading us instead to identify with the capitalist logic that has captured us. ¹³³

Though addressing metropolitan inheritors of the modern, it is not out of ignorance of the modern sciences’ role in relations with other collectives that this tradition is to be reclaimed but, rather, out of a recognition that (1) Gaia intrudes, (2) capitalism continues and (3) inheritors of those practice-worlds known as modern are catastrophically underprepared for either. Constructing new ‘exercises in insubordination’ cannot, therefore, involve condemning ‘the so-called modern tradition’ (in the sense that one would condemn a house) but rather insisting, however hazardous this may be, to ‘reworld our ruins and open them to partial connections with other worlds’. ¹³⁴

Objections to this appeal for renovation are not hard to hear. ‘The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house’, wrote Audre Lorde. ¹³⁵ The scars inflicted by colonial science indeed run deep, severing kith from kin across every domain. A ‘race’ here, a ‘culture’ there; every scission a cenotaph of ignorance. This diptych of problems – Gaia; capitalism – is, evidently, far from panoramic. However, while Stengers’ cosmopolitics may not be ‘a decolonial science of “deep relation”’, ¹³⁶ as Robbie Shilliam puts it, nor is it a reprisal of the sciences of severance. ¹³⁷ Rather, to reiterate, it refuses to accept being ‘doomed’ (save some unspecified future transcendence) to forever relate to others in a manner that poisons, dominates and consigns to capture. Thus, it works to enable inheritors of the modern, were they to define themselves as being capable of participating in such an event, ‘to think with other peoples and natures’. ¹³⁸ That is, it works to imagine a situation where the existence of other worlds would, in itself, neither elevate nor relegate the world that derives its ontology from the obligations of naturalistic scientific knowledge. One world among others but no world ‘like any other’; a world with indefinitely porous borders but not The World. Thus, cosmopolitics is in no way indifferent to projects of reclamation and restitution, nor need it dissociate from those of building cosmological acceptance, learning or healing. ¹³⁹ Nevertheless, this work starts, for Stengers, by taking seriously her own situatedness: chemist-philosopher, ‘daughter of the Enlightenment’.

Conclusion

While a diplomatic disposition, as Stengers articulates it, avoids an ethos of negativity or opposition – and while I wish to adopt such a disposition, at least in part – I cannot feign disinterest as regards critical judgement with respect to the propositions analysed herein. Rather than planet politics being a ‘capacious umbrella’, ¹⁴⁰ it seems to me, as it has been presented so far, to be rather more capricious. By so obscuring its internal discordances, it performs a pluralism that demands politics without being willing to practice politics. Furthermore, calls to ‘restore social justice’ ¹⁴¹ rather raise the question as to when, precisely, the social was ever just. As regards the Manifesto’s disdain for capitalism, I am reminded of Friedrich Engels, who once bemoaned those old forms of socialism that ‘certainly criticised’ capitalism and its consequences, however, being unable to ‘get the mastery of them [. . .] could only simply reject them as bad’. ¹⁴² One may, today, have well-founded reservations about the notion of ‘mastery’. However, the Manifesto, in the end, seems to me to adeptly synthesise a certain kind of ecologically driven ‘critical’ liberalism that aspires to save the world by changing as little as possible. ¹⁴³

That said, it should be reiterated that this is by no means a complete analysis of the texts in question. Moreover, it is far from clear that the stock reproach to such a discourse – that of diagnosing complicity with power and demanding a more radical negation – is capable of doing more than sounding the klaxon of critique. As such, I would like, finally, to consider what may remain conceptually valuable in prepending ‘planet’ or ‘planetary’ to our politics.

As it happens, the Ancient Greek πλᾰνήτης (planḗtēs) could mean a fever that came in irregular fits, a wandering star seen in the night sky, or any kind of itinerant or vagabond. It was only around 1640, as Galileo whiled away his last years under house arrest by the Inquisition, that certain European natural philosophers began to assert the Earth as a planet ¹⁴⁴ – that is, as a moving body in a heliocentric, rather than geocentric, cosmos; the much-vaunted ‘Copernican Revolution’. However, as Stengers writes in the opening pages of her Cosmopolitics, this ‘Revolution’ disguises a continuity: The ‘Earth-as-planet’ did not so much replace the ‘Earth-as-center’ as become its ‘supplement’. By refusing the compromise of Cardinal Bellarmin – that heliocentrism would be true but only ‘relative to the questions and calculations of the profession’ – Galileo laid claim to an authority that made possible both ‘genuine critical thought’ with respect to religious authority and, also, the power to assert scientific practices as ontologically delimiting every possible world. ¹⁴⁵

Planetary politics inherits this history and, thus related, must avoid being its ‘rentier’. ¹⁴⁶ At once the most humanly universal entity there can be and yet radically particular in its conceptual derivation, ‘the planetary’ is an apt reminder that no world can become The World and yet nor can any collective secede from this tangled earthly disunion. Thus, the planetary fittingly encapsulates the condition of ‘political multiplicity’. however, rather than serving disciplinary consolidation, this fitting encapsulation should be tied to problems of multiplicity of all sorts. The planetary presents us with the problem of diplomacy: the necessity of thinking, as far as this is possible, in-between‚ in the interstices of disunion. International Relations, it is often claimed (not least in this very periodical), ¹⁴⁷ was founded as a science of peace. I am, I must confess, rather uninterested in whether this locus of identification and nexus of coordination is on the way up or down. However, I am interested in how those gathered by shared concerns might respond to them, inventing speculative practices that maintain the possibility of unlikely alliances between disparate powers, and not only those of the nation state. The persisting promise of planetary politics is that it may remind us of the stakes of that task.