The Age of the World-Aesthetic

Neo-Malthusian Pathologies and Precarity in Koyaanisqatsi, Powaqqatsi, and Baraka

Bibliographic Data

ID6146887
AuthorsJimmy Casas Klausen (0000-0001-8357-199X, Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro, corresponding author)
Year2025
Volume5
Issue3
Publication date2025-07-01
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueGlobal Studies Quarterly (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2634-3797 • E-ISSN: 2634-3797
PublisherOxford University Press (OUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1093/isagsq/ksaf085
OpenAlexW4415223494
LanguageEN
References cited18

In the 1980s and 1990s, varieties of precarity and pathology became at once consumable, discomfiting, and beautiful in a series of cultural productions that developed on the basis of Neo-Malthusian aesthetics. This essay examines the visual language of Koyaanisqatsi, Powaqqatsi, and Baraka, and contextualizes them in relation to the way that the keyword “world” circulated in global policy discourses after the coining of “Third World” in 1952, and was visualized in aesthetic genres whose ambition was to display “the world.” I make the case for an analytical-diagnostic approach to the concept “world” in recent theories of world politics against prescriptive theories; likewise, I sketch a diagnostic aesthetics against recent orthodoxy in international relations and political theory. Visual analysis of the three films reveals the emergence of the “world-aesthetic,” in which “the world” became an object of aesthetic experience and affective investment for the first time qua whole world and numbered Worlds simultaneously. After decolonization, from “We Are the World,” to Reggio's and Fricke's films and the advertising campaigns of Benetton and the Body Shop, the world-aesthetic invited audiences not only to visualize the world as unity but also to experience that world in a way that positioned them as members of the First World, Third World or Fourth World according to the dominant pathologies of each: respectively, overconsumption, overpopulation, and the violence of uncontrolled development. Although the three films ultimately reveal that concerning forms of precarity emerge from these pathologies, the world-aesthetic blunts any possible sense of political crisis

Anthropological Studies and Insights · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories

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