ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Planetizing Territory: Reversing the Gaze on the Contemporary Production of Territorialities

• In Event: Scales of the Earth: Space, Science and the Specters of Planetary History 02

English Abstract

Terrestrial geocentrism has been claimed as a recurrent pattern in astrocultures and integral to both space enthusiasm and techno-scientific imaginaries of expansionism. Such an Earth-centric outlook on outer space and corresponding Earth-bound analogies have been key to worlding the unearthly and the extraterrestrial. Significantly, this has enabled the entanglement of outer space on ‘Earthly regimes of power’ with territorial and scientific narratives becoming a privileged locus for the construction of cosmic imaginaries. As territorialization has proved key to an ever-expanding process of globalization which in turn has made the entire planet into a shrinking territory, understandings of ‘planetarity’ remain bound to the very analytical category that is totalising, homogenising and capitalistic-centric. I will bring to bear to this terrain the ‘gaze reversal’ that is central to the plea for planetizing history, which evokes an extraterrestrial point of view that historicizes the emergence of the planet as a unit and the production of outer space alike as mutually co-constitutive processes. By bringing together ongoing efforts to planetize history and to move away from geocentric, that is terrestrial and territorializing, cosmic imaginaries, I will explore two interrelated issues. On the one hand, what it takes to reverse the gaze when it comes to understanding techno-scientific forms of production of territory based on Earth-observation technologies (e.g satellitation, pixelation). On the other hand, how territorialization processes themselves are changing in nature when it comes to outer space. This paper will also address, discuss and comment on some of the themes and problems discussed in the symposium ‘Scales of the Earth.’

Author

• Paloma Puente-Lozano, University Carlos III of Madrid