The Dialectics of Planetary History

Participants

Alexander C.T. Geppert (New York University/NYU Shanghai/HWK)

Max Arrouas (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)

Thore Bjørnvig (Copenhagen)

Christoph Conrad (Université de Genève)

Thomas Etzemüller (Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg)

David Kuchenbuch (Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg)

Julia Lossau (Universität Bremen)

Haitian Ma (Universiteit van Amsterdam)

Paloma Puente Lozano (Universidad Carlos III de Madrid)

Christian Peters (Universität Bremen)

Michael Robinson (University of Hartford/HWK)

Robert J. Sawyer (HWK)

Tilmann Siebeneichner (Leibniz-Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung Potsdam)

Brad Tabas (ENSTA Institut Polytechnique de Paris)

The inaugural workshop ‘The Dialectics of Planetary History’ aims to establish a new field of research which we call ‘planetary history.’ Built on the insight that the twentieth-century transformation of the world into planet Earth can only be understood by explicit reference to its outer spatial environment, planetary history seeks to fuse global history with space history.

Fourteen participants from eight countries representing seven disciplines in addition to science fiction will convene for two days to discuss what it means to planetize history and to historicize planetarity. The workshop’s title, ‘The Dialectics of Planetary History,’ refers to the ongoing challenge of understanding the historical production of planet Earth and its surroundings – known as outer space – as a dialectic process. Calling Earth a planet is meaningless unless viewed in the context of the heavens, outer space and the cosmos. The workshop explores how the political, cultural and economic repercussions of ‘going up’ transformed the ‘stature of man’ (Hannah Arendt) and his place within the universe historically, philosophically and scientifically, thus contributing to the making of the world into a planet.

The specifically planetary dimension involves considering scales and spaces that extend the surface of the globe and even the atmosphere into local space. The dialectical dimension of this process involves a commitment to conceptualizing the history of the planet as emergent from ongoing materially transformative practices and acknowledging the difficulty of establishing a fixed boundary between outer space and local planetary space without recourse to a ‘natural’ frontier such as the ‘global’ limits of the atmosphere. By exploring this dialectic, the workshop outlines the topology of competing spatial regimes that have produced planet Earth since 1946.