Planetary Aesthetic

Intervening eloquently into our relationship with planet Earth, Howard Caygill examines the two diverging conceptions of planetary consciousness that emerged from the cultural shock of Apollo 8’s seminal ‘Earthrise’ image. Where earth sciences have taken a holistic view of our planet informed by ideas of systematicity, earth, environmental and activist art are instead united by their disjunctive view of tension and tectonic connectivity.

Caygill starts by explaining the role of NASA and the instruments of planetary measurement and objectification in shaping much of today’s discourse around our presence on Earth. He frames the conceptual assumptions packed into this science, and its central role in informing climate activism, as being overdue philosophical scrutiny. From this point, the book pivots to the view that is so often proposed as an alternative, built around artists’ fascination with contested sites and fault lines in areas like forests, rivers, ice, sea, air and deserts. Ultimately, Caygill’s conclusion is that neither approach gives us exactly the tools that we need to deal with our planet’s ills. Working between the two, his new and disjunctive understanding of Earth instead corrects the trajectories of thought that span off from our first shared glimpse of it.