MARTIN GUINARD, BRUNO LATOUR, PING LIN, AND E-FLUX JOURNAL EDITORS, Editorial: You and I Don’t Live on the Same Planet
The issue deals with an increasingly pressing situation: people ‘around’ the world no longer agree on what it means to live ‘on’ earth - to such a radical extent that the foundational material and existential categories of ‘earth’ and ‘world’ are profoundly destabilized.
A division between those who seem to have abandoned planet earth, those who try to make it more habitable, and those whose cosmology never fits within the ideals of the globalizing project in the first place.
Furthermore, it divides each one of us at the personal level: for each decision we face, we know there are cascades of unintended consequences that make it hard to distinguish the right actions from the wrong ones.
The statement ‘we are divided’ should first be understood in an active sense, pointing to what divides us, that is, to what has destroyed the feeling of interdependence as an operative political effect.
What remains to be explored is how to set up such a collective and how to grant oneself the right to represent them.
In this state of division, the ‘common’ that remains is our shared responsibility to face the future. In this sense, accepting that different people live on different planets may provide a useful clarification: to understand whom to ally with, and whom to fight against. The possibility of such ‘diplomatic encounters’ remains a project to build, but aiming for such a project is already a radical departure from the path of war and conflict.