Planetary Diagrams

Paul Heinicker

Related terms: diagrammatics, forensic aesthetics, Gaia

As we reach the first quarter of the 21st century, we are confronted with a culmination of increasingly tangible events signalling large-scale systemic changes that cut across social, political, and environmental domains. For instance, we are witnessing and experiencing a steadily rising frequency of natural disasters, driven by the accelerating impacts of human-induced climate change.

These drastic and often emotionally charged experiences, circulated through the visual culture of media platforms, social networks, and real-time messaging, stand in stark contrast to the more abstract imagery that science has developed to comprehend such phenomena on a planetary scale (cf. Schneider 2018). Visualisations derived from sensing infrastructures and climate models attempt to grasp dynamics that unfold over centuries or millennia – far beyond the horizon of individual human perception.

We are fundamentally incapable of perceiving the full scope of these large-scale systemic changes through unaided human vision alone. In response, we construct models and representations – of pandemics, climate systems, or planetary boundaries – through abstract data, interpreted and made visible via diagrams (cf. Gabrys 2016). Increasingly, our way of approaching and understanding the world is mediated by such diagrammatic practices.

The foundational idea of planetary diagrams is therefore one of alternative visibility. It recognises the limits of traditional visualisation methods and seeks to expand them in ways that take seriously the environmental complexity and the entangled role of humanity within these planetary systems.

The term ‘planetary diagrams’ fuses two spatial concepts, each with its own rich intellectual history. The diagram, historically connected to abstraction, reduction, and instrumental reasoning (cf. Drucker 2014), is placed in dialogue with the planetary, which evokes vastness, interdependence, and nonhuman temporalities (cf. Likavčan 2019). Their conjunction signals a double gesture of opening: on one hand, diagrams must expand their scope and evolve to address urgent planetary crises – such as climate change, biodiversity loss, or resource depletion. In this sense, we ask, how can diagrams themselves become planetary? On the other hand, planetary conditions are becoming increasingly critical and in need of interpretation, communication, and understanding. So, what kinds of diagrams are required to render the planetary visible, comprehensible, and actionable?

Diagram

What, then, do we mean by diagrams? In everyday usage, we first associate them with highly manageable tasks – graphic devices that organise complex relationships, outline solution paths, and function as “thinking tools” (Krämer 2016, 13): circuit schematics, subway maps, assembly guides, among others. This solution-oriented perspective dominates much of the scholarship in diagrammatics. Sybille Krämer, for example, defines diagrams as operative imagery composed of point, line, and plane that impose order retroactively and guarantee orientation. In this view, they appear as clearly locatable artefacts – precise instruments of systematisation. At the same time, they are also pragmatically defined as tools that facilitate certain (cognitive) operations.

By contrast, Susanne Leeb – drawing explicitly on post-structuralist voices such as Deleuze, Guattari, Foucault, and Serres – develops a “dissolution-oriented” concept of the diagram (cf. Leeb 2012). Here, the decisive factor is process in the sense of de- and reconstruction: diagrammatic practice dissolves existing configurations, re-links elements, and opens speculative spaces of possibility. In such a poststructuralist sense, Guattari and Deleuze (1992) call the diagram an “abstract machine”: a dynamic force field that generates new reality-types instead of depicting the given. Guattari later radicalised this view, describing diagrams as “autopoietic machines” (Guattari 1995) that produce thought processes from within themselves. In this somewhat post-anthropocentric reading, diagrams do not appear as static images but as autonomous agents that destabilise structures before reconfiguring them.

Diagrams are therefore models of structural order. They function no longer as rigid schematics but as active procedures that invent new configurations within relational networks (see also Irrgang 2022). Their value lies in producing both order and disorder – delivering insight while imagining alternative arrangements. As Foucault’s (1995) reading of Bentham’s Panopticon illustrates, diagrams can model socio-political power structures as readily as artistic processes.

Put simply, diagrams are neither mere illustrations nor pure signs. They are fluid instruments of order-critique that allow data, power, and cosmologies to be materialised, thought, questioned, and transformed simultaneously. As designed processes that provoke further design, they operate between perception, theory, and political practice – revealing that any order might always also be constructed and represented otherwise.

Planetary

The Planetary – conceived as a model – dramatically widens the frame of our worldviews. It shifts the focus away from “the global,” which treats Earth as a manageable whole (Gabrys 2018), toward a geophysical process in which atmospheres, biosphere, hydrosphere, lithosphere, and technosphere interlock. A planetary perspective, therefore, introduces not only new orders of magnitude and ecological complexity, but also an ethic of co-responsibility: What modes of action are compatible with an Earth that is not an object of human control but a dynamic co-producer?

By contrast, the Anthropocene model foregrounds the dominance of human interventions, forcing planetary processes into human time- and space-scales. Benjamin Bratton instead argues for a post-anthropocentric standpoint in which social time is scaled up to geological time: human economies should attune themselves to tectonic rhythms rather than further reducing the planet to operational manageability (Bratton 2019).

Another prominent counter-figure is provided by the Gaia hypothesis of Lynn Margulis and James Lovelock. Here, the Earth appears as a self-regulating, living system that inseparably links organisms and milieus. Margulis (1998) reverses the moral gesture of “saving the planet”: it is not we who protect Gaia; rather, “the planet takes care of us” (Margulis 1998, 115). Our task is to shield ourselves from the consequences of our own actions.

Along these lines, Lukáš Likavčan (2019) positions the planetary as a viewpoint in which humans are merely temporary mediators of a largely impersonal, geophysical unfolding. He compares competing models – Anthropocene, Gaia, Terrestrial, Globe – and reminds us that every planetary imagination is a reduction, yet some models are better or worse suited to particular political and ecological tasks.

The planetary model, therefore, requires us to attune both perception and practice to the multilayered logics of the Earth system. It invites a re-location of responsibility – not as sovereign stewardship from without, but from a position of inherent embeddedness in cyclical, non-human dynamics whose duration and intensity must frame our thinking, designing, and decision-making with regard to acting towards a planetary future.

Earth as Non-Anthropogenic Image Archive

The concretisation from planetary models to planetary diagrams challenges us to regard the Earth not only as the object of pictures but as a generative medium for images. Contemporary climate images (Schneider 2016) – from IPCC hockey-stick graphs to global circulation model renderings – already qualify as operational diagrams (Parikka 2023): they translate atmospheric chemistry into legible shapes and thereby allow actors to coordinate mitigation and adaptation strategies. Yet their very power is simultaneously their flaw: by filtering climate data through statistical grids and computer code, they risk severing perception from the ecological substrate they claim to represent. The data image drifts away from what it abstracts.

To close this gap, we can invert the usual pipeline and ask whether the planet itself can be read as a diagram. Dietmar Offenhuber’s theory of “autographic design” (Offenhuber 2023) offers a blueprint here. Autographic images are not symbolic stand-ins; they are traces in matter that can only be read by humans after their appearance – dust on a façade, rings inside a tree, noise on a seismograph. “A datum is not a reference, but part of the phenomenon,” Offenhuber (2021, 70) insists. In an autographic framework, design begins with a material trace and ends with a record that never leaves the phenomenon’s own substance (Schuppli 2020). When such traces operate at the geophysical scale, they become non-anthropogenic planetary diagrams: the glacier’s retreat writes its own time-series, the bleached coral its own heat map.

The concept of the ‘hyper-aesthetic image’ proposed by the investigative group Forensic Architecture pushes this further. Every surface is potentially “sensing”; everything registers. A hyper-aesthetic approach proceeds in three moves – amplification of the sensorium, multiplication of vantage points, synthesis of distributed evidence – until matter’s silent witnesses begin to “speak” (Weizman and Fuller 2021). Here, the diagram is no longer a detached overlay, but the latent order discovered when heterogeneous traces are cross-read: burnt soil pixels align with satellite aerosols; smartphone videos of a flood align with river-sediment cores. The Earth writes, we edit.

My research project ‘Sensing Gaia’ (developed together with Merle Ibach and Patrick Salz: sensinggaia.tools) sets this philosophy to work. Starting from the provocative speculation, “What if climate change itself were a diagram we accidentally drew?”, the project treats drought cracks, forest-fire scars, or calving-ice acoustics as autographic inputs. Design operations – field recordings, elemental sound synthesis, ethnographic mappings – translate those inputs into multisensory narratives without stripping away their material provenance. The result is, for example, an audio-essay in which elements of Earth perform the roles of archivists: they preserve, succeed, update, and transmit evidence of ongoing systemic shifts.

1. What emerges across these practices is a new aesthetic loop: Planetary processes generate traces (like ice cores, isotopes, discolourations).
2. Autographic and hyper-aesthetic methods foreground those traces as images.
3. Diagrammatic reasoning organises them into relational models that re-enter the cultural sphere as policy dashboards, artworks, or speculative cartographies.

Within this loop, climate change itself appears as a giant, auto-encoded diagram – a structural re-ordering of atmospheric, hydrological, and biological matter under anthropogenic forcing. Unlike conventional charts, this diagram is co-authored by CO₂ molecules, ocean currents, urban aerosols, and only secondarily by humans who learn to read the marks they have helped inscribe. The value of planetary diagrams thus lies not in perfecting yet another global overview, but in training perception to recognise and interpret Earth’s own inscriptions – to treat cracked riverbeds, migrating isotherms, or microplastic strata as sentences in a planetary archive. In short, its non-anthropogenic quality names the capacity of planetary diagrams to shift visual culture from representing the planet to being addressed by it. By acknowledging traces as both data and diagram, we regain a situated aesthetics that reunites scientific abstraction with lived ecology. The climatic diagram is already out there, etched into ice and dust; planetary diagrammatics teaches us to read it – and, ideally, to rewrite it more responsibly.

Scaling Up

Both ends of the spectrum – the algorithmic climate model and the cracked riverbed, the burned forests and the bleached coral – belong to a single continuum I call planetary diagrams (see also Heinicker 2024). Despite their different registers, each tries to model climate as a dynamic planetary process. They are planetary because they anchor their operations in the Earth’s own architecture: geological strata, atmospheric flows, biospheric metabolisms. At these scales, representation ceases to be a human mirror and becomes a dialogue with forces that vastly exceed us.

Seen this way, planetary diagrams are not merely tools for human comprehension. They are gestures toward a post-anthropocentric visual culture in which data streams and dust particles, code and coral alike, collaborate to depict the changing Earth. Climate change itself is the paradigmatic planetary diagram: a mutating structure in which human and non-human agencies are inseparably knotted. Reading that structure demands more than pointing at rising temperatures; it asks us to recognise shifting relations of scale, responsibility, and futurity.

A diagrammatic practice of the planetary, therefore, means re-ordering patterns in explicit relation to Earth-wide interactions of organic and inorganic matter. It proposes that drought rings, soot layers, or atmospheric CO₂ curves are not after-the-fact illustrations but the very syntax of an ongoing planetary sentence we have helped to inscribe. By learning to parse those sentences – combining numerical abstraction with material traces – we cultivate an ethics grounded in shared processes rather than sovereign viewpoints.

Which brings us to an open, decisive question: What diagram does the Earth already hold for us, and how can we learn to read it? The challenge for the coming years is not simply to visualise more data, but to join the Earth in co-authoring diagrams that guide us toward livable reorganisations of our planetary home.

The idea for this glossary entry stems from an earlier text co-developed with Lukas Likavčan (Likavčan and Heinicker 2021), with whom I originally conceived the concept of planetary diagrams.

References

Bratton, Benjamin H. 2019. “Further Trace Effects of the Post-Anthropocene” Architectural Design 89 (1): Machine Landscapes: Architectures of the Post‐Anthropocene: 14-21.

Drucker, Johanna. 2014. Graphesis: Visual Forms of Knowledge Production. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Foucault, Michel. 1995. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. 2nd ed. New York: Vintage Books.

Gabrys, Jennifer. 2016. Program Earth: Environmental Sensing Technology and the Making of a Computational Planet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Gabrys, Jennifer. 2018. “Becoming Planetary” e-flux Journal.

Guattari, Félix. 1995. “Machinic Heterogenesis.” In: Chaosmosis – An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm, 33-57. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Guattari, Félix and Gilles Deleuze. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Heinicker, Paul. 2024. Anderes Visualisieren: Zur Kritik der Datengestaltung. Bielefeld: transcript.

Irrgang, Daniel. 2022. Erweiterte Kognition. Zum diagrammatischen Zeichen als verkörpertes Denkding. Berlin: Kulturverlag Kadmos.

Krämer, Sybille. 2016. Figuration, Anschauung, Erkenntnis: Grundlinien einer Diagrammatologie. Berlin: Suhrkamp.

Leeb, Susanne. 2012. Materialität der Diagramme: Kunst und Theorie. Berlin: b_books.

Likavčan, Lukáš. 2019. Introduction to Comparative Planetology. Moscow: Strelka Press.

Likavčan, Lukáš and Paul Heinicker. 2021. “Planetary Diagrams: Towards an Autographic Theory of Climate Emergency.” In Photography Off The Scale, edited by Tomás Dvorák and Jussi Parikka, 211-230. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Margulis, Lynn. 1998. Symbiotic Planet: A New Look At Evolution. New York: Basic Books.

Offenhuber, Dietmar. 2021. „Planet as Photographic Plate“. In: Fotograf Magazine 20 (40). S. 66–71.

Offenhuber, Dietmar. 2023. Autographic Design: The Matter of Data in a Self-Inscribing World. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Parikka, Jussi. 2023. Operational Images. From the Visual to the Invisual. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Schneider, Birgit. 2018. Klimabilder: Eine Genealogie globaler Bild­politiken von Klima und Klimawandel. Berlin: Matthes & Seitz.

Schneider, Birgit. 2016. “Burning Worlds of Cartography: A Critical Approach to Climate Cosmograms of the Anthropocene”, In Geography and Environment 3 (2).

Schuppli, Susan. 2020. Material Witness. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Weizman, Eyal and Matthew Fuller. 2021. Investigative Aesthetics: Conflicts and Commons in the Politics of Truth. London: Verso.