Exploring the planetary: on poetic contributions to developing a consciousness of terrestrial coexistence I

The scientific diagnosis of the Anthropocene as a new geological epoch in which the impact of human civilisation transforms the Earth system and its eco systems is linked to the practical challenge of ensuring the habitability of planet Earth for humans and millions of other species. The challenge calls for action, i.e. concrete measures to kerb and revise the transgression of planetary boundaries by the entire global community, particularly the rich countries whose economies heavily rely on fossil fuels. Moreover, we need a planetary society and governance to address the planetary crises such as climate change, biodiversity loss or pandemics.

These existential challenges are not merely practical but are first and foremost an intellectual task as they necessarily involve a fundamental transformation of our collective consciousness. We must shift our attention and learn what it means to live together on Earth, that is, on its thin surface layer, the ‘critical zone’ as earth system science puts it, in which billions of life forms and the chemical-physical processes exist as systemically linked (Latour, 2017). In order to learn what it means to live or, as Latour claims, ‘land’ on earth (Latour and Weibel, 2020), we need to understand the complex interdependencies of the feedback systems that connect multiple scales of time and space as well as every living being with others, the ecosystems, the human-made technosphere and the Earth system as a whole. This consciousness can be understood as an awareness of ‘planetarity’, a term proposed by Gayatri Spivak in contrast to ‘globality’ and its association with colonialism, capitalism and history (Spivak, 1999).

Awareness of planetarity or the planetary needs to be based upon the knowledge of the conditions for the possibility of life and human life in particular (Chakrabarty, 2021). It is crucial to recognise that the planetary is not an object to be measured or a resource to be used, but a complex and dynamic whole which enables life and is formed through life.

How can poetry contribute to developing an awareness of planetarity? How can it shift perspectives from (anthropocentric, modern, capitalist, neoliberal) existence to a complex coexistence? In this essay, and its sequel, I will look at recent contributions by three contemporary German-language poets whose works distance and alienate themselves from our everyday perspective and the intuitions that guide it. In different ways, formally and in terms of content, their poetry probes into the planetary.

The poetry collection Cosmos! (Matthes and Seitz, 2020) by the Bucharest-born and Berlin-based poet and filmmaker Dana Ranga is dedicated to the preparation, conduct and afterlife of space travel (structured accordingly in three chapters: PROLOGUE, COSMOS! and EPILOGUE). Following her first volume of poetry Stop – din pauzele lui Sisif (Stop. The Pauses of Sisyphus), which appeared in Romanian in 2005, Dana Ranga published her poetry in German in Ernest Wichner’s translation in 2023. In her last two volumes, she launched expeditions into spaces beyond the realm designed and perceived by humans. While the poems in her collection Wasserbuch (Waterbook, Suhrkamp, 2011) are dedicated to the largely unexplored life in the depths of the oceans, the texts from Hauthaus (Skinhouse, Suhrkamp, 2016) shine a light into the organic systems of the human body. The volume Cosmos! is Ranga’s first poetry collection dealing with the topic of space travel which she had examined in several documentary films and radio plays. As in those earlier works, Cosmos! is primarily about the experiences of astronauts and cosmonauts whom she interviewed. Several of the poems are versified quotations from the astronauts.

The words from the poem titled ‘The journey into space’ are attributed to the astronaut (and amateur poet) Story Musgrave, about whom Ranga made the award-winning documentary film Story in 2003. This programmatic poem that opens the collection defines the purpose of space travel as learning about the universe and one’s place in it:

The journey into space
is a journey of the mind
why are we flying into space
if not to learn
something about ourselves
and about what this universe
is all about?
About our place in the order of things
and about what it means
to be a human being.

(All translations by Asmus Trautsch)

The poem speaks about the hope that an anthropological insight will emerge precisely from the distance from the humans’ earthly habitat. It must take into account the fact that, over thousands of years of cultural development, humans have devised technologies that allow them to achieve a physical distance from the planet, which made this cultural development possible in the first place. From the orbit, some individuals, trained in space travel or simply extremely rich, can observe the Earth and, with the help of implements of representation such as cameras, allow everyone else to see it.

In Cosmos!, the so called ‘overview effect’ is achieved by adopting the astronaut’s perspective. The reader is invited to share this perspective which is supported by first photograph of the Earth taken from the moon by the crew of Apollo 8 in 1968. The ‘overview effect’ consists of an emotional experience of awe, in which ‘most astronauts […] realize the global interconnectedness of all life and feel responsibility for the future of our planet’, according to the scholars Ekaterina R. Stepanova, Denise Quesnel and Bernhard E. Riecke (2019). In Ranga’s poems, this effect is associated with an awareness that puts geopolitical conflicts and national borders into perspective and transcends narcissism and egocentricity.

Does this photographically and poetically generated perspective on the ‘whole earth’ help to create a planetary consciousness, as the environmental movement around Stewart Brand hoped in the late 1960s and 1970s? On the one hand, Ranga’s poems seem to adopt the sovereign (and god-like) subject position criticised in the discourse on the Anthropocene. The poetically imagined astronaut’s perspective seems to strengthen the figure of human as observing counterparts of (terrestrial) nature, instead of thinking of them as part of it and interwoven with it. On the other hand, however, Ranga’s poems do not invite the reader into an unconditional identification with the observer’s gaze from the space, because they reflect upon the situatedness of this gaze. Its position is identified as ‘fundamentally hostile to life’.

In order to take the experience of space seriously, one must, according to Story Musgrave, temporarily abandon the ‘earthbound standpoint’. But adopting this outsider perspective is an epistemically misleading way to understand what it means to live in the thin layer on Earth, the critical zone of the atmosphere, hydrosphere, pedosphere, biosphere, technosphere and their material processes and cycles. Part of the epistemic dimension of the Anthropocene is precisely that humans ‘no longer find themselves standing over and above a world of objects but rather caught in the midst of things – in the midst of climate change, of coexisting forms of life, of technologies and technological consequences’ (Horn and Bergthaller, 2020).

Dana Ranga’s poems show that a medially represented view of the Blue Marble is contingent on an enormous degree of alienation from the earthbound life. Seeking this perspective from the outside of the critical zone seems more like epistemic escapism than a path to the realisation of a planetary human condition. In Cosmos!, the context in which the gaze appears depends precisely on the behaviours that stand in the way of an awareness of the coexistence of all life and of the need to ensure the habitability of the planet.

This includes not only the enormous consumption of resources in space travel, which continues throughout the (modern) history of heroic (mainly male, as Ranga’s female astronauts point out) exploration through mechanisation, industrialisation and colonisation. It also includes the collaborative but unsustainable and highly disciplined way of life of the space travellers, which has to be adapted to the political, scientific and economic systems on earth and to the non-terrestrial environment.

In Ranga’s poems, spacefaring is characterised by competition, isolation and confinement, disconnect from the environment, other people and all life on earth with very high social, emotional, cognitive and physiological stress. The default of cosmonaut life is long, hard work, divided into countless steps, just as the lines in Ranga’s poems are conspicuously broken up by many leaps in the lines, which, indicating the technically structured space travel process, are first left-aligned (PROLOG), then arranged like branches of a tree around a central axis (COSMOS!) and finally right-aligned (EPILOG). In this artificial life, the poems show the Earth appearing, if it appears at all, ‘somewhere on the left side’ and ‘engulfed in storms and lightning’. Only during a contemplative pause accompanied by Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony it is perceived from space as a sublime home.

The poems from Cosmos! show that the voyage to a contemplative, peaceful view of a beautiful planet is the ‘worst possible experience’ rather than anything else. The world, and the space travellers’ highly artificial possibility of experience remain unmediated and therefore the latter proves insufficient for achieving a planetary consciousness. According to cosmonaut Yuri Romanenko, one cannot live in the ‘dissonance / between / our work here on earth / and that in the cosmos’. In Ranga’s poems, the technologically enabled distance from the Earth’s atmosphere is worldless. It creates, neither directly nor ‘ex negativo’, a way of thinking about the planet that would have a lasting effect on the Earth (although astronauts initially show greater respect for human and non-human life). Dana Ranga laconically establishes a melancholia of disappointment that is perhaps still not fully understood today:

The astronaut

has laid
the moon
at his beloved Earth’s feet –
and she still does
not love him.
He has performed the impossible
in the history
of humankind.
And what have we
made out of it?
Almost nothing.
[...]

The Berlin-based theorist and poet Daniel Falb takes a rather conceptual view on the Earth as a mere example of a planetary existence within the series of countless habitable exoplanets, which include ‘Titan / Kepler 186f.’ (2015b). In Falb’s and philosopher Armen Avanessian’s ‘astrobiologically informed natural philosophy’, the specific realisation of the planets’ potentials is conceived in terms of time, as the natural-historical unfolding of evolutionary transitions from replicable molecules to the current 9th transition, i.e. the development of computation and the ‘de-biologization of collective intelligence’ (Avanessian and Falb, 2024).

For Falb, representations of the Earth and its evolutionary history are therefore not possible through sensual representations of an object such as the iconic NASA photographs, but only through data collection, calculations, models, simulations, theoretical descriptions, graphs and poetic images (Falb, 2015a, 2019a, 2021, 2022, Avanessian/Falb, 2024). According to him, the planetary is therefore not only ‘in the species of alterity’ (Spivak, 2012), but also something that is epistemologically and technologically co-produced by humans themselves, also from space with the help of remote sensing.

Falb’s poems can be understood as an offer to approach the planetary in terms of form. Against the backdrop of the Anthropocene, they work with ‘terrapoetics’ (2015b), in which everything, every data point that concerns the past, present and future of the planet, can appear in the poem (Falb, 2015a). Falb understands the positionality of poetry – the place from which it speaks – as ‘standing before the alphabetised whole of language’ (Falb, 2014). Poems can, in principle, performatively incorporate all things linguistic and their frayed connections with visual and sound ‘languages’. This positionality – which is not a position of (human) experience like the position of the astronauts – allows poetry to contribute to the formation of a planetary consciousness. Planetary poems, as finite readable forms that are generated from the whole of language, refer to the semiotically abundant, yet unreadable spatial-temporal whole of the planet.

For Falb, in order to better understand the immanent character of the planetary, poetry must ‘enter into the exploration of manifestations of being-in’ (Falb, 2015) – as in a museum:

+
+
‘Which sea level should you try to immortalise in
Submanuscriptesque-Stria,
if not the one you found there by chance?
Once the reaching high, A-B, once
The reaching down, B-A.
Your nature conservation of the Archaic...
Your nature conservation of the Mesozoic...
Your nature conservation of the random inventory list of the Holocene-
Museum

Your nature conservation of the Earth’s random population in the year 10,000,000,000.
10 years after Chicxulub...

Denisova 4’s canine tooth, a
somehow super-intelligent thing, thrown into the
Elderly care

A museum for the museum
A house against the homelessness of houses, in
Paretomanuscriptesque-Stria

Nice that this part of the manuscript (lube)
fits onto the random disposition of
Your aesthetic faculties
The impact on the comet, which
subsedimentally stroboscopically fades away.’

‘Chicxulub Paem’ (Falb, 2019b) – a long poem or, as Falb varies, ‘paem’ alluding to different associations and statuses of the text – navigates through the Schiller National Museum in Marbach. The museum appears as a memorial site of the history of the Earth and especially of the hominids, where they interact (textually/sexually). Because it is aesthetically suitably air-conditioned, it can draw together the archive of natural history curated at random in an artificial simultaneity. The ‘Museum for the Museum’ thus prefigures the climate modelling of the biosphere, which Falb conceives of as a ‘Holocene museum’ in which the global average temperature of the last warm period could be artificially preserved (if the Paris Agreement of 2015 is implemented, among other things). For Falb, setting up this museum permanently is a goal of planetary politics (2019a).

In addition to the climate and its (chaotic or deliberate) modelling, the realm of the planetary and its political contact with the global includes the world population, in which all individuals are necessarily entangled, as it is the geological-political power that shifts the Holocene into the Anthropocene and the planet from the 8th to the 9th evolutionary transition. In an essay dedicated to the concept of the world population, Falb decorates this planetary phenomenon with various images such as milk, foam, smoke or mercury, which cannot be translated into concepts: the world population is a ‘hyperobject’ (Morton, 2013) that is neither perceivable nor intellectually clearly conceivable (Falb, 2022).

‘Who is the we? We humans never experience ourselves as a species’, asks Chakrabarty (2021). The extension of the species into deep time levels is only calculable. To our mind, it remains a mystical entity, a ‘mystique’, similar to the God of negative theology, according to Falb. Every human being is already a part of this pre-individual evolutionary substrate at the moment of conception from the gametes (oogamy), as the poem ‘Young against Old’ puts it: ‘You are already walking, / and your ova / are printed out of the / pink / neon-yellow ontological light foam of the world population, / and your ovaries, / and the Nike-under-pants around them’, so that ‘you are 'dressed in foam'’ (Falb, 2023).

How differently the individuals living on the planet co-constitute the shape of the world’s population as individuated specimens (not as individualities) in every moment of their existence, varies for historical and political reasons. This can clearly be recognised in the statistical life expectancy, which is extremely unevenly distributed across the globe within the current world population, a fact that Falb repeatedly criticises sharply (Falb, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024). In the poem ‘Young against Old’, races for people over 100 appear as a ‘[damaged] universalist chamber’, which only has room for a few due to the military protection of the EU’s external borders (‘Belarus border’, ‘Macedonian border’).

Falb’s text demonstrates the planetary connection between life expectancy and the violent limitation of space: Europeans secure a high life expectancy with the corresponding geriatric infrastructure and sports equipment, produced outside of Europe by capitalist corporations such as Adidas and Puma. In this way Europe takes decades of life expectancy away from politically excluded individuals instead of developing and distributing the educational, medical and technological resources on Earth in such a way that all members of the world population could have the same statistical life expectancy – a political world situation that Falb elsewhere calls HALE communism (‘health-adjusted life expectancy communism’) (Falb, 2021).

Whereas the poem ‘Young against Old’ examines the world population in its political and socio-economic form today, the eponymous poem from Falb’s 2023 book Deutschland. Ein Weltmärchen (in leichter Sprache) (Germany. A world fairytale (in easy language)) deals with the world population as a planetary deep time figure that has existed long before the formation of states and the division of peoples along national identities and languages. The first-person speaker of the poem takes the reader on an imaginary journey to the DeepL-HQ in Cologne. Unlike Heinrich Heine, whose 1844 long poem ‘Germany. A Winter’s Tale’ Falb’s volume alludes to, the ‘I’ doesn’t regard language as a ‘fatherland’. Instead, he/she writes poetry quasi-naturally in French (which the Parisian exile Heine refused to use), indeed ‘in every language to which DeepL carries me, / Je fais déjà de la poésie dans toutes les languages vers lesquelles DeepL me porte. / I’m already doing it, / voila. / Je le fais déjà. / Nothing at all – / pas de chose’.

Falb not only counteracts the residues of romantic heritage and the concept of poetic genius which link the development of a poet’s or translator’s individuality with the identity of a language and nation. He also shows how a long cultural development, which has led to the AI technology of the Large Language Models used by DeepL, suddenly creates a radical discontinuity in planetary development.

In simple language, the poem ‘Deutschland. Ein Welt-Märchen (in leichter Sprache)’ describes a hypothetical genealogy of Babylonian multilingualism and the technological eradication of its longe durée: ‘Before people spoke different languages, / they spoke the same language. / Then they lost sight of each other. / Their speech went out of tune like pianos. / Much time passed. / One language became two. / Leak. / I enter my verses into DeepL, / and it simply eats up time’. The AI servers in Keflavík, Iceland, devour the languages as ‘time nuts’, ‘UNTIL WHEN THE LANGUAGES WERE ONE’. What remains are the crumbs of the hypothetically assumed primordial language, that is ‘the language of mitochondrial Eve’. The poem does not try aesthetically to reconstruct this language from the more than 7,000 currently extant languages, but shows how the Ursprache becomes effective through AI, as the translation machine turns out to be a time machine. It dissolves the supra-aesthetic deep time of ‘5,500 years’, which ‘lie between German and French’, within a sub-aesthetic duration of ‘0.001 sec.’ and thus generates an ‘eternal contemporary literature’. It is as if we could all speak and read a language at a click of the mouse – like the children of the woman from around 175,000 years ago, whose mitochondrial DNA all later humans can be traced back to.

This uncanny leap through time, which opens up completely new potentials for communication and literature distribution in the present and future, is, however, dependent on a capitalist player with power that generates this ‘time biscuit’. The poet’s own agency in dealing with the AI tool (‘I paste’, ‘mark’, ‘copy’, ‘enter’, ‘press enter’) cannot generate content reliably when jumping through the history of language: ‘The output window remains empty’.

Perhaps it remains empty because something is not working. Or because the target language does not have mountains of written material on which the LLM could be trained. This would be true for most of the world’s current languages, spoken outside of the rich North. As long as there is no public AI as a common-pool resource for everyone and every language on earth we will not have the power to create a post-Babylonian understanding for the planet’s human population.

In Falb’s poem, products of globalisation, technologies that are unthinkable without computation and the internet, inspire planetary thinking in deep time, which in turn leads back to the realisation of the unbroken power of globalisation and its divisions of the world population with unacceptable consequences such as the massive life expectancy gap and highly unequal extinction of languages.

An awareness of planetarity, as Falb’s poetry suggests, cannot only be thought of from a scientific or ecological Earth system perspective. It must also consider social and political diversity and criticise atavisms such as the nation-state or private-sector management of global commons, planetary problems and the blatant lack of biosphere rationality (Falb, 2015a).

Insofar poetry such as Falb’s can include separated discourses, perspectives and scales, it contributes to the research programme of ‘planetarities’, ‘which is dedicated to the planetarisation of the social as well as the socialisation of the planetary’ (Hanusch, Leggewie and Meyer, 2021). Such poems can develop a poetic understanding what it means to live on planet Earth in the early Anthropocene, when in the planet’s thin membrane ‘everything is moving extremely close together (hand-axe right next to LHC)’ (Falb, 2015a) and destruction on various scales becomes increasingly chaotic.

References

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