Spatial and Scalar Multitudes: Thinking with World, Globe, and Planet

Abstract

Abstract: "Spatial and Scalar Multitudes: Thinking with World, Globe, and Planet" offers a theoretical framework and overview of the themed issue "World, Globe, Planet." This themed issue considers the recourse to macroscopic categories in early modern cultures and argues for their value as a resource for understanding present-day invocations of large-scale categories in conversations about the global, globalization, and geopolitics, on the one hand, and in conversations about the planetary, the environmental, and the Anthropocene, on the other. The tensions between such approaches encourage also a reconsideration of scale, interconnection, universality, modernity, cosmopolitanism, and other foundational concepts. Pieces in the collection, both scholarly and pedagogical, take up other keywords and points of fracture around totality, horizon, collectivity, and sphere.