The Planetary Age

Three of the most protean and potent ‘ages’ coined to grapple with twentieth-century modernity – the ‘space age’, the ‘global age’ and the ‘planetary age’ – share an extra-terrestrial perspective on the world, be it through Earth photography, spaceflight technology or satellite-based infrastructures. A comparative reading of the conceptual histories and popular trajectories of these three ‘ages’ reveals a staggered picture. The notion of a ‘space age,’ first used by a British journalist in 1946, is the oldest of the three; it soon became a cornerstone of all expansionist space propaganda. The idea of a ‘global age’ only began its meteoritic rise in the mid-1970s, not least as a by-product of the post-Apollo gaze reversal towards Earth and concomitant with an onsetting socio-theoretical debate on ‘globalization’ as an adequate category of world comprehension. The term ‘planetary age’ – popularized, but not excogitated in Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Climate of History in a Planetary Age (2021) – is the most incipient, least fixed of the three ages. Sometimes thought of as a successor of the ‘global age’, its success must be read as an attempt to find a conceptual alternative to replace now outdated-seeming globalization narratives.

The talk traces the historical origins of these three ‘ages’; juxtaposes competing conceptualizations by contemporaneous observers and present-day critics; and extricates their respective diagnoses of superseding presents. None of the three ages, it turns out, is as purely descriptive and politically neutral as it appears. Rather, all three propagate different twentieth centuries grounded in divergent geographies, temporalities and futures: a belief in infinite expansion, world-wide entanglement as an unstoppable trajectory, and an earth without humankind.