The Planetary Turn The Planetary Turn Relationality and Geoaesthetics in the Twenty- First Century Edited by Amy J. Elias and Christian Moraru northwestern university press evanston, illinois Northwestern University Press www .nupress.northwestern .edu Copyright © 2015 by Northwestern University Press. Published 2015. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data The planetary turn : relationality and geoaesthetics in the twenty-first century / edited by Amy J. Elias and Christian Moraru. pages cm Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-0-8101-3073-9 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8101-3075-3 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8101-3074-6 (ebook) 1. Space and time in literature. 2. Space and time in motion pictures. 3. Globalization in literature. 4. Aesthetics. I. Elias, Amy J., 1961– editor of compilation. II. Moraru, Christian, editor of compilation. PN56.S667P57 2015 809.9338—dc23 2014042757 Except where otherwise noted, this book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. In all cases attribution should include the following information: Elias, Amy J., and Christian Moraru. The Planetary Turn: Relationality and Geoaesthetics in the Twenty-First Century. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2015. The following material is excluded from the license: Illustrations and an earlier version of “Gilgamesh’s Planetary Turns” by Wai Chee Dimock as outlined in the acknowledgments. For permissions beyond the scope of this license, visit http://www.nupress .northwestern.edu/. An electronic version of this book is freely available, thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched. KU is a collaborative initiative designed to make high-quality books open access for the public good. More information about the initiative and links to the open-access version can be found at www.knowledgeunlatched.org. Contents Preface and Acknowledgments vii Introduction: The Planetary Condition xi Amy J. Elias and Christian Moraru Planetary Poetics: World Literature, Goethe, Novalis, and Yoko Tawada’s Translational Writing 3 John D. Pizer Terraqueous Planet: The Case for Oceanic Studies 25 Hester Blum The Commons . and Digital Planetarity 37 Amy J. Elias The Possibility of Cyber-​­Placelessness: Digimodernism on a Planetary Platform 71 Alan Kirby Archetypologies of the Human: Planetary Performatism, Cinematic Relationality, and Iñárritu’s Babel 89 Raoul Eshelman Planetarity, Performativity, Relationality: Claire Denis’s Chocolat and Cinematic Ethics 107 Laurie Edson Gilgamesh’s Planetary Turns 125 Wai Chee Dimock Writing for the Planet: Contemporary Australian Fiction 143 Paul Giles The White Globe and the Paradoxical Cartography of Berger & Berger: A Meditation on Deceptive Evidence 161 Bertrand Westphal Comparing Contemporary Arts; or, Figuring Planetarity 175 Terry Smith Beyond the Flaming Walls of the World: Fantasy, Alterity, and the Postnational Constellation 193 Robert T. Tally Jr. Decompressing Culture: Three Steps toward a Geomethodology 211 Christian Moraru Bibliography 245 Contributors 269 Preface and Acknowledgments Planetarity: our moment. A way of being and a way of measuring time, space, and culture in the human sciences and on the planet at large. Whether a break with modernity, as some argue, or its extension into the twenty-first century, as others contend, this new moment involves, more than any other geosocial shifts of the modern era, spectacular spatial- cultural reconfigurations on a global scale. Evincing its epoch- making power are, certain critics point out, the overall weakening of the ties between determinate locations and cultural formations such as discourse, identity, and community, and, more specifically, the enfeebling or even severing of the living, connective links between cul- ture and nation-state sovereignty. Other scholars have insisted that planetary modernity is a new cosmopolitanism, a less “bounded” model of cultural origination in which autochthonous “roots” become rerouted first cross- regionally and then globally, inherited filiation yields to voluntary affiliation, and “vertical” derivation gives way to horizontal dérive (drifting) and playful self- fashioning. For all their differences, both scenarios share a belief that the contemporary place- culture nexus has been shifting, faster and faster, across cultural practices and disciplines, and that a new form of relationality is emerging worldwide among people and across language groups, national boundaries, and categories of cultural expression. Confronted with such onto- aesthetic changes, the humanities must revisit, perhaps even jettison, established approaches and formulate new lexicons and descriptive models. A radical upswing in population mobility, global interconnectedness, and, following from them, discourse’s “worldly” inter- dependence demands that theorists of art and culture work out apposite accounts of global influences and palimpsests— in Yoko Tawada’s poetry, for instance, which, as John Pizer shows in this collection, carries one back to Goethe and Novalis as much as to Japan’s history and national language. In the same vein, we need to reformulate national literatures as planetary inter- textuality, as Wai Chee Dimock does in her analysis of Gilgamesh; we have to rethink the antipodes as rhizomatic connections, as Paul Giles counsels in his essay; we must envision, as Christian Moraru has advocated, a “cosmodern” arts vocabulary that pertains to our planetary time-space stage within and without the United States. Insofar as they can be traced back to the voyages, “discoveries,” and displacements of the early Renaissance, our intellectual challenges, no less than the world realities generating them, are not new; their pervasiveness vii viii Preface and Acknowledgments and intensity are. Whether, once again, the planetary is the Habermasian end point of modernity or it signals that both the modern and its postmodern coda are behind us is not yet clear. In the thick of things at the dawn of the third millennium, we have no unobstructed view of where we stand. What is apparent to many, however, is what the introduction to this book identifies as the “cultural- aesthetic symptomatology” of our juncture. The Planetary Turn is devoted to this symptomatology and to the “condition” it appears to attest to. Something is happening. Something is afoot. And this something seems to fit neither the global, neocolonialist models of modernity nor Marx- ist teleological diagnoses of capitalist globalization; it sits ill with definitions of twentieth- century postmodernism, and it grates against easy celebrations of cultural sovereignty and “difference”; it looks more substantial than an “affectsphere” and significantly less politically articulated than a global rev- olution. Thus, the questions posed in this book speak to the pressure this condition puts on us to theorize it and recalibrate our critical instruments and aesthetic- critical vocabularies to its newness and oftentimes amorphous, contradictory character. This is what, critically and theoretically speaking, the planetary turn strives for: a decisive reorientation toward the unfolding present and its cultural paradigm. This book has been made possible by an abundance of intellectual guid- ance and logistical resources. Therefore, as coeditors, we have a large number of individuals and institutions to thank for their support. We are grateful to our contributors for their goodwill and substantial and patient involvement in this enterprise. We also thank Northwestern University Press for faith in the project and publication of what we believe to be a groundbreaking vol- ume. We are especially indebted to Henry L. Carrigan Jr., senior editor and assistant director at Northwestern, to his staff, and to the two anonymous readers who evaluated our manuscript. We would also like to thank Jered Sprecher for allowing us to use a reproduction of his painting Quell the Storm (2010, oil on linen, 48" x 36") on the book cover, as well as the editors of English Language Notes for giving us permission to reprint, in modified form, Wai Chee Dimock’s article “Recycling the Epic: Gilgamesh on Three Continents,” first published in ELN 51, no. 1 (Spring–Summer 2013): 19–33 (http:// english.colorado .edu/eln/). Christian Moraru expresses his gratitude to the following programs, insti- tutional entities, and people who have supplied much- needed funding, advice, and venues of critical exchange: the German Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, for a 2012 research stipend at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich; University of North Carolina, Greensboro (UNCG), for a 2012 Summer Excellence Fellowship; also at UNCG, the College of Arts and Sci- ences, specifically for the assistance extended by the college’s dean, Timothy Johnston, over the past few years; UNCG’s English Department, its past and present heads, Professor Anne Wallace and Professor Scott Romine, respec- tively, and its inquisitive and collegial faculty; UNCG’s dynamic Atlantic Preface and Acknowledgments ix World Research Network and its director, Professor Christopher Hodgkins, whose support, encouragement, and genuine interest in the thorny issues tackled here have been absolutely invaluable; UNCG’s Office of Research and Economic Development and its vice chancellor, Terri L. Shelton; UNCG’s