The Global Now

Are we in the process of already freeing ourselves from the grip of the "global"? In the Anthropocene age, when human beings are casting themselves, in real time, in the triple role of agents, witnesses and historians of the interactions of climate, living world and geology, the epistemological "too human" category of the "global" is experiencing both its apotheosis and the beginning of its decline, in favour of the "planetary". To be sure, the two categories are far from being incompatible, and what Anna Tsing has mischievously called "the charisma of the global" 1 is brandishing its effectiveness more than ever in the human sciences, as is illustrated by the recognition this notion is enjoying in western institutions and in one or two extremely interesting publications reported in this issue of Critique d'art. 2 But this "charisma" is qualified, not to say flawed, by new questions which are currently exercising knowledge, discourse and art praxis and, needless to add, the political word. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, a pioneering figure of post-colonial feminist thinking, makes a distinction between the "globe", which is situated "in our computers" and cannot, as such, be "experienced", and the "planet", a living and inhabitable radical otherness, but only on credit, capable of encompassing "an inexhaustible taxonomy of names of forms of human otherness". 3 "The global reveals to humans the sphere of the planetary", explains, in his turn, Dipesh Chakrabarty, who, after making the case for a reversal of focus leading us to "provincialize" Europe, adapts his method to the planetary scale to make the globe itself a very specific province of our solar system. If, for Spivak, the globe is an abstract form, which can be essentially reduced to liberal technoscience, Chakrabarty, for his part, is interested in the at once transcendent and immanent otherness of the globean actual threat and an actual hope

Apotheosis · Archaeology · Geography · Globalization and political ideologies · Historical Geography and Geographical Thought

• The Planet

  Dipesh Chakrabarty•Critical Inquiry•2019

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