I live in a part of New Delhi — which is both a very new and a very old city — close to a ridge of reddish quartzite rocks that are part of the oldest extant mountain range on earth; the Aravalli Range. The Aravallis are close to 3.2 billion years old. So old that they have been worn down to a stubble of rock, like a rash on the face of the earth. Once they were mighty mountains; now they are mainly gravel, rock, pebble, and hard, rough, thorn-laden ground. Walking on these stones, which I have done, on hot, dry midsummer afternoons, foggy winter mornings, and humid monsoon nights throughout my life, I have a sense of walking on a young, still-changing planet, and being astride an ancient world. It takes me back to a time, a Pre-Cambrian deep time, when the ground that I stand upon today was much closer to Antarctica than it was to the not-yet-risen Himalayas. Perhaps some places offer a greater sense of planetary time than others. I like to think that the city in which I was born, made, and live, is one of those.

What does it mean to be planetary? I’d like to find out by invoking, first, a statement by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, which I think we can use as a key with which to open many doors. “I propose the planet to overwrite the globe.” [1] But in doing so, I immediately want to think of what globes and planets can do to our sense of location, our bearings, in space and time. The word “planet” comes from a Greek expression that suggests a wandering celestial body. Our Earth is very much that wanderer. She spins about her axis at the rate of 460 meters per second, which is roughly a thousand miles per hour. Her orbit around the sun implies a speed close to thirty kilometers per second, or 67,000 miles per hour. The solar system itself whirls around the center of the Milky Way at around 490,000 miles per hour. This means that, depending on which question we are asking — about rotation, orbit, or celestial waywardness — our home, this planet, is anything but still. We are whirling. I have always derived some comfort from this fact when I think about the meaning of the name we give to our practice as artists: Raqs. The word Raqs can mean whirling in several languages, but especially in Arabic, and one of our own, Urdu. I enjoy the sense of being synonymous with the restlessness of our planet.

The other thing about being a co-inhabitant of a planet is that we all share a roughly spherical topology. There’s a simple law of physics—the principle of isostatic adjustment—which has to do with the fact that all the mass of a body greater than a certain minimum size is uniformly attracted, gravitationally, to a point at its center. This shapes bodies in space of a certain mass into spheres. And it is true of all spheres, that every point on their surface can claim centrality. No point on asphere is more central than any other point. Being planetary thus means giving up the illusion that any place is more “central” than any other place.

My fascination with spheres, and the globe, reaches back into childhood where I saw a boy my age, the character Apu, in the second part of Satyajit Ray’s The Apu Trilogy [2] being handed a globe and books on invention, exploration, and discovery by his village school’s headmaster. As he grows older, the boy Apubecomes a young man, travels to Calcutta for higher studies, and carries the world, the globe in his hand . This always suggested the possibility of an intimacy with the planetary, a familiarity with the world and with worldliness. It makes me think of what Marx means when he says, “The becoming-philosophical of the world is at the same time the becoming-worldly of philosophy; its realization is at the same time its loss.” [3]

The word “planetary” or Grihojagotik, came back to me recently at the Dhaka Art Summit, [4] (see pp. 227–42), where it featured as part of a title of one of the exhibitions. It led me to think more about the place of the planetary in the history of artistic work in our part of the world. From globes in Mughal miniatures (the Emperor Jahangir was particularly fond of them) to astrolabes and astronomical instruments designed with a sense of planetary movements in mind in medieval Delhi, Jaipur, and Punjab, and images of the avatars ofVishnu playing with the globe as if it were a ball—we have always had different ways of playing with and deploying the planetary idea in South Asian cultures.

The idea of the world as a game, aslila, has fascinating resonances. The modern Greek philosopher Kostas Axelos reprises Heraclitus’s idea of the “world game” when he says, “The world deploys itself as a game. That means that it refuses any sense, any rule that is exterior to itself. The play of the world itself is different from all the particular games that are played in the world.” [5]

I believe that Relation is the moment when we realize that there is a definite quantity of all the differences in the world. Just as scientists say that the universe consists of a finite quantity of atoms, and that it doesn’t change — well, I say that Relation is made up of all the differences in the world and that we shouldn’t forget a single one of them, even the smallest. If you forget the tiniest difference in the world, well, Relation is no longer Relation. Now, what do we do when we believe this? We call into question, in a formal manner, the idea of the universal. The universal is sublimation, an abstraction that enables us to forget small differences; we drift upon the universal and forget these small differences, and Relation is wonderful because it doesn’t allow us to do that. There is no such thing as a Relation made up of big differences. Relation is total; otherwise it’s not Relation. So that’s why I prefer the notion of Relation to the notion of the universal... [6]

Both Glissant and Axelos present an expanded view of worldliness. I view worldliness as something critical to the question of how we overcome the exhaustion of the contemporary. If we are to be serious about what it means to be inhabitants of a wandering star—an errant planet with an eccentric orbit—the paths we must follow are those that take us back to the sense of what it means to be planetary. To be contemporary with the prehistoric and with the forms of life which are yet to come. That’s the temporal dimension that I think contemporary art has the opportunity at this point in time to actually embrace. Again, it’s about being abreast of the minutest fluctuations of our own time, and at the same time understanding the rhythms that take a few million years to resolve themselves.

Let us return to the Aravalli Range. The reason why the Aravalli Hills are so special for me is because they are evidence in their own way of the fact that India, Australia, Africa, Latin America, and Antarctica were once one continent. The man who thought this up was an Austriangeologist, Eduard Suess, who also worked on the mountainous terrain of Salzburg. His theory was based on his observation of the distribution of a fossil plant, Glossopteris, that turns up across vast distances in the Southern Hemisphere in a time-consistent geological stratum. Unusual and distinctive, Glossopteris characterizes an unusual sequence of non-marine sedimentary rocks found through much of the Global South. Subsequent studies of the fossils and the character of the sediments have shown the existence of similar rock formations in South Africa, South America, Antarctica, Australia, India, Madagascar, and other areas, all of which contain common flora and fauna. It is now possible to correlate the succession of freshwater sedimentary strata, beginning in the late Paleozoic and continuing well into the Mesozoic, in these widely separated areas. The Glossopteridae rose in the Southern Hemisphere around the beginning of the Permian Period (298.9 million years ago), but became extinct during the end-Permian mass extinction.

By looking at the fossil record, Suess deduced that at some point in the remote past, the now distant continental masses of India, Australia, Africa, and Antarctica were one supercontinent that he called“Gondwanaland.” The name “Gondwana” was suggested in 1872 by Henry Medlicott of the Geological Survey of India for a sequence of nonmarine sedimentary rocks. He took the name from the ancient kingdom of the Gonds, one of the principal aboriginal tribes believed to have inhabited a large part of central India in which the most complete sequence of these rocks is found

And that is why, when I take a short walk from my home onto the red gravel of the Aravalli Ridge in Delhi, I know that under my feet I have found the reason for a planetary sensibility. Let us mark this moment, here, by marking the way this location allows us to address the question of what we call the planetary, which is fluid because it takes the career of the sphere we live on in time, not as a frozen ball suspended in space, but as a fluid wandering star—moving through and in time

Along with this greater planetary consciousness, there is of course also greater anxiety. Those who captain the ship of contemporary art have expressed concern that perhaps this assumption of the global planetary is premature. I’ve heard this even from progressive colleagues who say we neglected what was under our eyes, and therefore also neglected the rise of xenophobic nationalism, and so on. I don’t think the answer is a return to parochial sensibilities. I don’t think that’s even a way of addressing local realities. This is the delusion intellectuals have when they do not connect with people on the street. If they connected with people on the street, they would understand that ordinary citizens the world over have a fairly good idea about a new cosmopolitanism—a democratic, or I would even say, a proletarian cosmopolitanism. It is only in the noise of political debate and discussion in the feuilletons and television studios that anxiety about localisms exists.

So it’s necessary for us to have a balanced view of the world. I come from a country in which we are ruled by a form of political power that is exactly like Donald Trump. So do you in Japan. In Turkey, Russia, the United States, India, Japan, we are all ruled by these big men who think they speak to local anxieties. But I think this is the last hurrah of nationalism. It will fall because it produces itself in reaction to the immense tectonic movements taking place within populations all across the world.

The ground beneath our feet is fluid; the earth is a labyrinth of connected and resonant fault lines. Nothing stands still. Nothing ever has. Over one hundred earthquakes are recorded each week across the world. Many remain undetected because their magnitudes are very small, or because there are vast stretches of land and sea where there are no sensors. These earthquakes and micro tremors, including those unregistered on theRichter scale, are the signs of geological life, of mobile magma, of evidence of an animate planet.

The world of humans too is active, with cascading microtremors, daily seismic shifts, and the occasional upheaval. Occurrences, varied in tone and intensity, manifest themselves in an increasing frequency of deoccupying workplaces of managements, work riots, work stoppages, slowdowns, tool-downs, “wildcat” acts of wage workers’ self-activity, and continuous insubordination—sometimes angry, sometimes joyous, occasionally both—in educational institutions, natural habitats, housing estates, prisons, battlefields, and cities. Power’s vision is weakened by its entropic excesses. The rising, falling, sliding, colliding, and overlapping waves of the messianic, the hedonistic, the mystic, the altruistic, the communistic, and the heretical forces of our times, with their countercurrents, constitute a seismic terrain, a discontinuous, broken, abrupt transcript of the daily life of our world.

Perhaps we could speak of a seismic shift displacing capitalism toward a reconfiguration of human life along uncharted lines. The question now is the ability to sense the magnitude of these tremors, with their spin, their charm, their direction, and their intensity. The networked intelligence of a global workplace is quietly turning into a platform for the daily insurgencies that mirror or transcend the fluctuations of the market life of commodities. The crucial question is: can it lead to new, concrete proposals for the material futures of our host planet and its guest life forms? Can the emerging self-consciousness of the networked intelligence of seven billion inhabitants of this planet lead to hitherto unimagined possibilities for reinventing what it means to be a social species?

The work of art, and the imagination, is an antidote to the poison of every inevitability. A work of art challenges the notion that things have to be a certain way. Because every work of art contains within it a myriad of other possibilities in relation to what already exists. Nothing has to be the way it is. Nothing is just the way it is. Everything has a secret wish to be something else. This includes the world at large. The lives of the seven billion-odd people who make up the world intersect somewhere in the republic of the imagination to create a desire for another world. Art is the process of finding that desire, and of making drafts of the future walk into the present on the basis of reading that desire.

For instance, a certain claim was made when the First International [7] produced itself. Unlike the case of Documenta X (1997) or Documenta 11 (2002), the participants were all men, all European, from a tiny fraction of the globe. You could say they were unrepresentative of humanity—which is true, and will always be so, because no matter what collection of people you gather, they will always be unrepresentative of the enormous complexity and diversity of the human condition. But just think for a moment about the ambition they had and the scale of their desire to embrace a global condition.

That is what is important. For instance, a great thinker who came out of the Paris Commune, the geographer Élisée Reclus, actually thought of urban planning on a planetary scale. And such ambition does not always have to lead to some sort of totalitarian master narrative. We can also think of it as a moment of expansion and imaginative largesse or generosity. Another famous Reclusian image, the one reproduced on the cover of Anarchy, Geography, Modernity, a collection of Reclus’s essays, [8] contains no such ambiguity. In this image, we see Nature herself contemplating or watching over the earth, which this time is clearly held in her hands. The contemplating and holding seem to be inseparable parts of one process. The image evokes aspects of the contemporary ethics of care, an important dimension of ecofeminism, in which “holding” is a key concept.

The planetary haunts us. It haunts us in the Earthrise photographs from the early years of space exploration. It haunts us in Hannah Arendt’s meditation on the exploration of outer space, marked by the launch of the Sputnik satellite in 1957:

In 1957, an earth-born object made by man was launched into the universe, where for some weeks it circled the earth according to the same laws of gravitation that swing and keep in motion the celestial bodies—the sun, the moon, and the stars. To be sure, the man-made satellite was no moon or star, no heavenly body which could follow its circling path for a time span that to us mortals, bound by earthly time, lasts from eternity to eternity. Yet, for a time it managed to stay in the skies; it dwelt and moved in the proximity of the heavenly bodies as though it had been admitted tentatively to their sublime company.[...] The earth is the very quintessence of the human condition, and earthly nature, for all we know, may be unique in the universe in providing human beings with a habitat in which they can move and breathe without effort and without artifice.

The human artifice of the world separates human existence from all mere animal environment, but life itself is outside this artificial world, and through life, man remains related to all other living organisms. For some time now, a great many scientific endeavors have been directed toward making life also 'artificial,’ toward cutting the last tie through which even man belongs among the children of nature. It is the same desire to escape from imprisonment to the earth that is manifest in the attempt to create life in the test tube, in the desire to mix ‘frozen germplasm from people of demonstrated ability undert he microscope to produce superior human beings’ and ‘to alter [their] size, shape and function’; and the wish to escape the human condition, I suspect, also underlies the hope to extend man’s lifespan far beyond the hundred-year limit. [9]

To be planetary is to understand the limits of being earth-bound, of being finite, of being mortal. This means that we understand our own fragility and care for our brittleness. It means that claims to power, and to sovereignty, are just that, claims; entitled bits of legal fiction hurled around by those who don’t have to care much. The Earth has no naturally sovereign countries. Sovereignty is only an invention of powerfully armed, ambitious men that slice the globe into sections to be administered.

I return to what Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak meant when she proposed the planet to overwrite the globe:

To be human is to be intended toward the other. We provide for ourselves transcendental figurations of what we think is the origin of this animating gift: mother, nation, god, nature. These are names of alterity, some more radical than others. Planet-thought opens up to embrace an inexhaustible taxonomy of such names, including but not identical with the whole range of human universals: aboriginal animism as well as the spectral white mythology of post-rational science. If we imagine ourselves as planetary subjects rather than global agents, planetary creatures rather than global entities, alterity remains underived from us; it is not our dialectical negation, it contains us as much as it flings us away. And thus to think of it is already to transgress, for, in spite of our forays into what we metaphorize, differently, as outer and inner space, what is above and beyond our own reach is not continuous with us as it is not, indeed, specifically discontinuous. We must persistently educate ourselves into this peculiar mindset. [10]

The place that art makes in the world does not have to be a palace, a prison, or a promenade. It can be a culvert, a conduit, or a detour off the highway. Off the highway where speed reigns, where the grand procession marches on the spot, very fast, forever, not really going anywhere. It can be that vestibule, that shortcut, or secret passage, that turn in the labyrinth that gets us from here, wherever “here” is, to “there”—that tantalizing lighthouse on the horizon.

The place that art makes in the world is a departure lounge for a time-traveling expedition. It can take us to the future as easily as it can take us to the past, or sideways into other worlds, concurrently; here, now, inside or outside, but unknown to our own. The place that art makes in the world is found by ascent to an altitude in which close companions can become welcome strangers, where strangers can become familiar. It is a mountain peak on the range called uncertainty. The place that art makes in the world is the natural habitat of the third man. That strange, delightful companion, the one you find when you hallucinate on a long, hard climb. Not you, not me, but someone else who makes it unnecessary to ask whether it is you, or me.

The place that art makes in the world has the taste of solitude and the texture of solidarity. It has the porosity of intimacy and lives and breathes like a crowd. The place that art makes in the world is not a destination, not a way station, not a terminus, not a junction, not a spot on a timetable. No trams, trains, airplanes, or motorboats can get you there. You walk to get there, not on your feet, but on the limbs of your questions and desires. It is not far. It is not close at hand.


Raqs Media Collective was founded in Dehli in 1992, by Monica Narula, Jeebesh Bagchi and Shuddhabrata Sengupta. Their work finds them at the intersection of contemporary art, philosophical speculation and historical enquiry.


First published in:

Amanshauser, Hildegund, and Bradley, Kimberly, eds. Navigating the Planetary: A Guide to the Planetary Art World – Its Past, Present, and Potential. Salzburg International Summer Academy of Fine Arts, Verlag für moderne Kunst, July 2020.

This text is based on a lecture given at the conference Global Academy II, Examples of Transcultural Exchange, Salzburg Summer Academy of Fine Arts 2018, see: https://youtu.be/cP5bjBhCar4, (accessed March 2, 2020).

• Planetary Commons
• Cosmology