The history of astronomy shows the manifold forms of human views of the world. Setting out from fear of demons and magic, humanity always has to travel afresh the path to the abstract logic of scientific observation. – Aby Warburg [1]
As we inhabit the turbulent interstice of global and planetary world views, Aby Warburg’s nearly 100-year-old exhibition staged at the Hamburg Planetarium offers resonant, ancestral guidance for our present. Arranged in elliptical paths, his didactic installation of astronomical and astrological images activated a dialogue between scientific and cultural practice, narrating humanity’s evolving relation to the cosmos through a European lens.[2] Warburg’s Image Collection on the History of Astronomy and Astrology brought together epistemology with mythology, linking what is expansively distant, with the intimacy of human meaning-making. The ensemble of annotated images was not merely a display about our world views upon the cosmos, but a meditation on how we narrate the consequences of those views upon human self-understanding in our earthly activities. Inspired by Goethe’s character Lynceus from Faust who could both “view what is far,” and “see what is near,”[3] by gazing out into the dark abyss, how we see ourselves is inwardly transformed, affecting who, what, and where we humans imagine ourselves to be.
Distant Viewing and Intimate Seeing
An altered world view is not merely the result of acquiring new information, but a question of how it reorganises conditions of sense-making, encompassing more than scientific knowledge alone. In dramatizing the interplay between epistemology and cultural beliefs, Warburg’s exhibition traced the evolution of perspectival frameworks through which ‘seeing what is near’ is mediated, and not simply an ocular sensory capacity. Seeing is conditioned by knowledge that positions and focuses it in certain historically attuned, culturally specific ways.[4] In our moment, the climate sciences and their manifold, prognostic charts, graphs and models may deliver knowledge about a planetary condition, however we are only in the nascent stages of mediating the consequences of it in perspectival terms. In other words, we may be able to abstractly view the planetary, but are learning how to intimately see and make-sense from within its conditions. It is on this crucial point where the significance of aesthetic practices comes into particular relevance for us today: through what historical conditions is our ‘seeing’ mediated? From what perspective do world views mediate and make sense of what is seen? And through what concepts and/or assumptions do we draw distinctions between the near and the distant? Taking cues from Warburg’s prescient exhibition, From the Cosmos to the Commons positions public art as a means for mediating this continuum between knowledge and storytelling, between abstraction and proximity, asking how the planetary reorients world views, and what role art plays in experiencing these shifts in perspectivally, meaningful ways.
The Global and the Planetary
There are critical distinctions between the global and the planetary necessary to outline, demonstrating how these summon radically different world views. While the planetary has always existed, ontologically speaking, [5] it only became recognizable in epistemological terms through global technical and scientific activities (themselves, extensions of Euromodern practices). Techno-scientific inventions that led to a dependence on fossils fuels and the increase of threatening CO2 concentrations in our atmosphere, are indivisible from the globally distributed institutions and technical sensing apparatuses that can measure and model this very phenomenon. Since the discovery that human interventions upon earth have fundamentally changed the biogeochemical conditions of it, we find ourselves in unprecedented conditions: for the first time in our history, as Sylvia Wynter wrote, the planetary compels us to imagine coexistence and inhabitability for an environment in common, despite how uncommonly lived it is. [6] Where once we could imagine ourselves in locally-contained human communities, the aggregate consequences of our activities overflow said local bounds. From plutonium isotopes scattered across the globe from ‘local’ nuclear detonations, to the proliferation of chicken bones as future-fossils of industrialized food production, to shifting bird migration patterns, to oceanic salinity, the complex agglomeration of earth systems, have been rendered legible by human techno-scientific achievements, yet all of which now reveal ‘us’ to be the architects of our own conditions of inhabitability. Upon this recognition, as Dipesh Chakrabarty makes clear, recounting the domain of history as the unfolding of strictly human events is no longer sufficient to account for the ramifications of these activities within earth system dynamics, effectively signaling the collapse of the European Enlightenment Humanist separation between human and natural history as a particular world view, one that continues to be reinforced by disciplinary thought. [7] Put succinctly, a global world view continues to uphold a narration of human centrality and separability, as the vantage point from and through which to see.
Planetary Trans-Scalarity: From a Grain of Sand to the Hydrosphere
While both the global and the planetary tend to evoke pictures of sheer largesse, the planetary, it must be emphasized, is a trans-scalar phenomenon. The planetary is contained in “every grain of sand” as an artifact of astral-evolutionary energetic processes, [8] as much as it encompasses the vastness of atmospheric systems, technological infrastructures connecting continents by undersea cables, and everything in between. While the global can be described as the projection of human activites upon the earth, the planetary compels a narration of entangled embeddedness within dynamical earth-systems. Where projection requires a figure separate from ground, entangled planetary embeddedness marks an end to a world view premised on separability, [9] be that the inseparability of the human from geological temporalities, to the microbial companions laboring in our gut, to the aggregate consequences of daily activities that link distant geographies into a shared, inter-human and multi-species space in common. While these diverse scales of existence do not readily conform to our human senses (in spatial and temporal registers), learning how to see and make-sense of these scalar alterities demands vital aesthetic experimentation against a perspective of mastery over the earth, to one “squatted by” [10] its complex metabolic processes.
The program of artistic interventions curated within the city of Hamburg is not only about the planetary, but summons an intimate seeing from planetary perspectives. The planetary may exist in our minds as an epistemic model, however the stakes of the planetary are irreducible to information about it, despite the necessity of scientific procedures to view it at a distance. Because, as Gayatri Spivak noted, we do not live in abstract models, but inhabit worlds, [11] the question before us is how the epistemological recognition of the planetary may be rendered consequential at the perspectival level of re-seeing ourselves, and how we re-orient practices as a result. Spivak names this imperative to re-imagine practices ‘planetarity,’ which offers us a helpful distinction when speaking of this condition: ‘the planetary’ as a scientific, epistemological mode of describing complex metabolic Earth-Systems as a view, and ‘planetarity’ as transformations in seeing, and thus sense-making at the level of experience of an environment in common. Whereas the planetary can be viewed as a mathematical model, planetarity denotes a seeing, related to the existential domain of sensation, narration, and the invention of forms of life. It is along such a continuum of distinct, yet integral forces of relating to the cosmos – both analytically mathematical and culturally meaningful – that we can reflect back upon Warburg’s exhibition that embraced such a continuum between logic and myth, distance and proximity, science and storytelling, as an guide for our present, and the urgent need to transform world views in light of planetary recognition.
What happens in Hamburg, does not stay in Hamburg
In the public installation of art in the city, for the city, we may add our own planetary attuned condition: that site-specificity become mediated by scale-specificity, particularly as the lines on a map demarcating the limits Hamburg are rather arbitrary both at the scale of the atmospheric, and as we have recently experienced during the pandemic, the viral. What happens in Hamburg, does not stay in Hamburg, and what enters the city, didn’t necessarily originate there. This is not to rehearse the unhelpful, binary dismissal of the map vs. territory, where one instance fetishizes abstract totality, and the other a concrete immediacy, [12] it is rather to uphold them stereoscopically, where meaningful sense-making derives from their interfacing. As we learn to navigate our exit from global world views premised on separability, and earth as a passive backdrop for human-centric infinite desires, how may this moment of planetary recognition summon new ways of understanding and narrating ourselves; what impacts would this revisioning bear upon the idea of ‘our’ city, and how can art participate in mediating sensorial experiences for this yet inexperienced condition of seeing – a condition nourished by epistemological legibility, but without human existential precedent? From the Cosmos to the Commons invites audiences less to view, but to see from within the planetary perspectival spaces afforded to sensation. How may artworks divert from ready-made Euromodern legacies to ‘make-ready’ human sensitivities entangled in trans-scalar systems, for inhabitable worlds in common?
Beyond the Narration of ‘Man’
For Sylvia Wynter, the impetus behind this separation of the human from natural history, traces back to the birth of ‘Man,’ the human-model epitomizing philosophical Humanist values, figured as detached from nature and masterfully rational over his surroundings. While all human cultures construct a human-model around and through which to construct unique forms of life, according to Wynter, this particular European model of ‘Man’ become inflated to global proportions upon colonial expansion, coming to stand-in for a ‘we’ of humanity at large. This can be evidenced in the much criticized ‘Anthropos’ of the Anthropocene designation, when in actuality most humans have not contributed to climate collapse, yet all of humanity is nonetheless implicated in the scientific terminology. ‘Man’ was initially operationalized beyond his Westen European regional origins upon the colonization of the Americas, forcing a species split between him and his subhuman others, coming to ‘justify’ structures of domination. From such a human-model of ‘Man’ premised on the separability from Nature, a Euromodern cosmology has cascaded: ‘Man’ becomes a measure for all things and an environment has been crafted in his likeness, for his comforts alone; ‘Man’ as a figure separate from the ground, implies a seeing of this ‘ground’ as inert and passive, serving only to nourish his limitless appetites in what Marx would call a ‘metabolic rift’ from Nature when addressing the repercussions of early industrial-era political economy upon human self-images.
The over-representation of ‘Man’ as a globally-inflated, particular perspective from which to projectively see and make sense of the entirely of the world, is one that privileges homogeneity. With only one ‘proper’ way to be human, and a world engineered according to that vantage-point, the erasure of diversification as a general tendency follows suit: be that noodiversity (diversity of ideas), biodiversity (species extinction), technodiversity, [13] mono-valuation (Capitalist Markets), and scalar diversity (‘Man’ as the measure for all things). [14] As a result of this homogenizing mode of existence, the relationship of ‘Man’ to alterity, to that which is unfamiliar, has been riddled with coercive propencities, when not outright violence. The castigation of oral human-cultures as sub-human to ‘Man’s’ written histories, is but one example of ethical and epistemological subordination enacted in the early phases of ‘Man’s’ global expansion. The overcoming of ‘Man,’ as a perspectival exit from world views predicated upon taming unfamiliarity, offers us preliminary mandates of orientation for planetary conditions: How are we to see the foreign without forcing familiar categories of evaluation and judgment upon it? How are we to encounter otherness without othering?
The centuries-long entrenchment of ‘Man’ as a human-model through which to see the world, has rendered it such that it is often treated as an immutable law of nature. It is crucial to recall, however, that ‘Man’s’ naturalization, or what appears as a law of nature, is due to its mimetic rehearsal in the systems, structures, values, and norms fashioned according to its likeness that we are recursively incentivized to perform into reality. As hybrid bios-mythos, our so-called third level of existence, the domain of symbolic exchange and meaning-making, not only produce external social environmental condition, but also the subjective, experiential internalization of those myths. [15] ‘Man,’ in this regard, is a fiction, a powerful model-story performed into existence. Rather than seeking some permanent, fixed human essence to account for ‘the human’, Wynter urges us to figure ourselves as variable Homo Narrans, that is creatures who practice and coordinate their self-storytelling into environments for inhabitation. Through these narrative implications of ‘Man’ the planetary is less a question of denouncing anthropocentrism, than it is speculating on stories from without this perspectival place and mode of seeing. While it may be possible for ‘Man’ to view the planetary in light of his epistemological achievements, it is impossible to intimately see the planetary from his perspectival frameworks that have now become threatening obstacles. To echo Wynter’s plea, “a ceremony must be found” to depart the self-referential naturalization of ‘Man’ and his narrative grip in order to see and experience embedded from within planetary logics. [16] A plea that asks how worlds in common may be crafted anew without ‘Man’ as a vantage-point?
Patricia Reed is a theorist, artist, designer and co-curator of the Sensual Symposium Towards the Planetary Public Sphere taking place at the Warburg-Haus, 22.6.2025.
[1] Aby Warburg qtd. in Uwe Fleckner, “From Mythical to Mathematical Orientation: The “Cosmologicon” of the Hamburg Planetarium as a Branch of the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg,” in Art Research Journal, vol. 9, 2022. https://periodicos.ufrn.br/artresearchjournal/article/view/29654Warburg’s quote is from a text plate accompanying the painting commissioned from his son Max Adolph Warburg: Man between abstract logic and fear of demons(1929-1930) that was displayed in the Hamburg Planetarium exhibition in 1930.
[2] Uwe Fleckner, “From Mythical to Mathematical Orientation: The “Cosmologicon” of the Hamburg Planetarium as a Branch of the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg,” in Art Research Journal, vol. 9, 2022. https://periodicos.ufrn.br/artresearchjournal/article/view/29654
[3] Ibid.
[4] John Berger, “Ways of Seeing” https://www.ways-of-seeing.com/ch1.
[5] Jonathan S. Blake and Nils Gilman, Children of a Modest Star: Planetary Thinking for an Age of Crises, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2024), 8.
[6] Sylvia Wynter, “A Ceremony Must Be Found: After Humanism,” in boundary 2, 12 (Spring-Autumn 1984), 19–70.
[7] Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” in Critical Inquiry, Vol. 35 (Winter 2009), 197-222.
[8] Lukáš Likavčan, “Searching the Planetary in every grain of sand,” in Digital Earth on Medium, 2020. https://medium.com/digital-earth/searching-the-planetary-in-every-grain-of-sand-introduction-to-digital-earth-fellowship-2020-2021-8692e5ff3a05
[9] Denise Ferreira da Silva, “On Difference Without Separability,” inLive Uncertainty: Catalogue for the 32ndSao Paolo Biennale, (2016) 57-65.
[10] Lukáš Likavčan, Introduction to Comparative Planetology, (Moscow: Strelka Press, 2019).
[11] Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Imperative to Re-Imagine the Planet,” inAn Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012), 335-350.
[12] Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy: Or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism, (London: Verso Books, 2024).
[13] Bernard Stiegler, “Noodiversity, Technodiversity: Elements of a New Economic Foundation Based on a New Foundation for Theoretical Computer Science,” in Angelaki 25, no. 4, 2020, 67-80.
[14] Zachary Horton, The Cosmic Zoom: Scale, Knowledge and Mediation, (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2021).
[15] Sylvia Wynter, “Unparalleled Catastrophe for our Species,” (interview with K. McKittrick) inSylvia Wynter: Being Human as Praxis, ed. K. McKittrick, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), 59.
[16] Sylvia Wynter, “A Ceremony Must Be Found: After Humanism”.
