The Cosmo-Political: Rethinking the Political / Rethinking Outer Space

Keywords: outer space, the political, planetary, earthbound, cosmopolitics, astropolitics,
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Tuesday
Session Start / End Time: 3/1/2022 02:00 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 3/1/2022 03:20 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 11

Abstract

What happens to the political in outer space?
A number of prominent thinkers of the political have not merely assumed the Earth to be an implicit backdrop for their theories but have explicitly framed the political as fundamentally earthbound. Hannah Arendt, Carl Schmitt and more recently Bruno Latour have all developed explicitly earthbound conceptions of the political, albeit in different ways. Further, all three have figured the extension of human activity into outer space as introducing a dangerous disorientation into the foundations of the political. For such thinkers the boundaries of the Earth provide stable markers for the boundaries of the political.
Whilst this paper departs from such earthbound conceptions of the political it takes up the idea, explored by geographers, that the political is constitutively bound up with specific sets of spatial, material and historical conditions. Further it pursues the idea that as such the expansion of social relations into outer space may fundamentally reorder the conditions of the political with consequences for how we understand both politics and outer space and the modes of thought and practice that emerge from their entanglement. Drawing on recent experiments in ‘planetary thought’ and place-based studies of social relations in outer space this paper seeks to explore what it might mean to think about the political in a more-than-planetary register. How might space exploration reshape the relations, actors and projects traditionally bound up with theories of the political? Can we imagine a just and emancipatory cosmo-political beyond ‘astro-politics’ and its critics?