ABSTRACT
Being able to assume a planetary, as opposed to a global, imaginary is a surprisingly recent phenomenon. 1 Although depictions of an earthly global sphere are longstanding and multiple (see Cosgrove 2001, DeLoughrey 2014; Heise 2008), the specific attributes of being able to see the entire planet as a single unit or system, I would argue is a Cold War creation. This mode of thinking is therefore deeply imbricated not only in nuclear age militarism but also the specific forms of twentieth-century knowledge production, as well as a related proliferation of visualization technologies (see Haffner 2013; Kurgan 2013). A planetary imaginary includes globalities of every kind (finance, technology, ecology) but also geology, atmosphere, and the biosphere as one totality. What is increasingly powerful about this point of view is that it both relies on the national security state for the technologies, finances, and interests that create the possibility of seeing in this fashion, but also, in a single image exceeds the nation-state as the political form that matters. A planetary optic is thus both a national security creation (in its scientific infrastructures, visualization technologies, and governing ambitions), but it also transcends these structures to offer an alternative ground for politics and future making. Proliferating forms of globality—including the specific visualizations of science, finance, and environment—achieve both ultimate scale and are unified at the level of the planetary, which raises an important question about how collective problems and security can, and should, be imagined.
