Realm of freedom and realm of necessity in definitions of the ‘planetary’: Cold War, Great Acceleration and the impediments of human-Earth entanglements.
Abstract
This reflection takes a perspective on planetarity as not only a certain ethics of relations between humans and the environment but also as a historically determined mode of human-Earth entanglements that produces rather impediments than open-ended futures. In response to Pikner’s Resonances of planetarity and commons within evolving urbanisms, I found it useful to revisit Marx’s notions of ‘realm of freedom’ and ‘realm of necessity’ and to propose that there could be at least two approaches to define the planetary. In one definition, planetary condition (as care and sensibility-driven entangled interactions between humans and the Earth) belongs to and further expands the realm of freedom. In another definition, planetary condition (as accumulated human socio-political and military activities strategically entangled with Earth matter for humans’ competitive survival) constitutes the range of non-deliberated impediments and therefore belongs to the realm of necessity. In such a view, based on my own research experience, I propose to read the current interest in the ‘planetary’ as an attempt to start deliberating the underlying, initially non-deliberated, foundations of societies produced by the Great Acceleration and the infrastructural unleashing of human/Earth interactions starting from the 1940s−1950s.
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Copyright (c) 2025 Siarhei Liubimau

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