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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
In a series of televised interviews broadcast in spring 2022, Bruno Latour explained, in clear and straightforward terms, how humans have changed the planet and why environmental disasters are an intrinsic part of modern life. We have now come to realize that all life depends on a thin skin of our planet that is only few kilometres thick - what scientists call the 'critical zone'. Our capacity to continue to live on a planet we are transforming is now at risk and if we wish to survive as a species, we must put an end to the mechanisms of destruction, rethink our connection to living beings, and face head-on the confrontation between the extractivists who are exploiting the Earth's resources and the ecologists. This poignant reflection on the greatest challenge of our time was also an opportunity for Latour to explain the underlying thread that guided his work throughout his career, from his pathbreaking research on the social construction of scientific knowledge to his last writings on the Anthropocene.
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CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Introduction
An iconoclastic sociologist
The living manufacture their own conditions of existence
A kind of collective thinking
Society doesn’t exist
‘An overdose of reductionism’
Observing science
A ‘new class struggle’
Changing worlds
The end of modernity
Gaia puts us on notice
Where do we land?
The new ecological class
Inventing collective apparatuses
The truth of the religious
Science in action
The modes of existence
The circle of politics
Philosophy is so beautiful!
Letter to Lilo
Thanks
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Introduction
Begin Reading
Thanks
End User License Agreement
Pages
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How to Inhabit the Earth
Bruno Latour
Interviews with Nicolas Truong
With the collaboration of Rose Vidal
Translated by Julie Rose
polity
Originally published in French as Comment habiter la terre. Entretiens avec Nicolas Truong © Les Liens qui Libèrent & Arte Éditions, 2022. This edition is published by arrangement with Les Liens qui Libèrent and Arte Éditions in conjunction with its duly appointed agents Books And More Agency #BAM, France. All rights reserved.
This English edition © Polity Press, 2024
Cet ouvrage a bénéficié du soutien du Programme d’aide à la publication de l’Institut français / This book is supported by the Institut français as part of the ‘Programme d’aide à la publication’.
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press111 River StreetHoboken, NJ 07030, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-5948-0
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2023934718
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
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Introduction
Nicolas Truong
Wanting to pass on, to explain. To explain himself, as well, meaning to explain how coherent his thought actually was, a fact that had partly been masked by its apparently wide-ranging nature and the variety of subjects he tackled. In his Paris apartment, Bruno Latour threw himself into this series of interviews with a simplicity, an exuberance, and a force that only comes to the fore in moments when you know that life, and notably the life of the mind, is being cut short. There was a deep calm linked to a sense of urgency, an immanence indissociable from imminence, and the need to bring everything together, to sum it up, get it out there. A concern for clarity, a pleasure in conversation, that performance art. As if everything was becoming clearer as the end drew near. Bruno Latour died on 9 October 2022 at the age of seventy-five. He is one of the most important French intellectuals of his generation. ‘France’s most famous and misunderstood philosopher,’ wrote the New York Times on 25 October 2018.
A celebrity and celebrated abroad, recipient of the Holberg Prize (2013) and the Kyoto Prize (2021) for his whole body of work, Bruno was, indeed, misunderstood for a time in France, so disparate did his objects of study seem. It must be said that he delved into almost all realms of knowledge: ecology, the law, modernity, religion, and, of course, the sciences and technologies with his inaugural and explosive studies of laboratory life.
Bruno was all the more misunderstood as, with the notable exception of Michel Serres, with whom he conducted a round of interviews, Eclaircissements,1 philosophy in France has often steered clear of the theory and practice of the sciences.
‘He was the first to feel that the whole challenge for politics lay in the issue of ecology,’ recalls sociologist Bruno Karsenti, as was attested, as early as 1999, by the publication of Politiques de la nature,2 written in consonance with Serres’s Le contrat naturel (1990).3
An iconoclastic sociologist
But without a doubt it was two books dedicated to ecology, and delivered in the form of questions, Où atterir? (Where do we land?)4 and Où suis-je? (Where am I?),5 that brought this iconoclastic sociologist to a much broader public.
Born on 22 June 1947 in Beaune (Côte-d’Or) into a large bourgeois family of wine merchants, Bruno Latour grew to become one of the most influential philosophers of our time, inspiring a new generation of intellectuals, artists, and activists anxious to do something about the ecological disaster.
Ever since ‘the intrusion of Gaia’, in the words of the philosopher Isabelle Stengers,6 with whom he enjoyed an enduring intellectual friendship, one chronicled by Philippe Pignarre in Latour–Stengers, un double vol enchevetré,7 Bruno never stopped thinking about the ‘new climate regime’ we live in.8 For ‘we have changed worlds’, he explained, since we entered the Anthropocene Age, in which man becomes a geological force. ‘We’re not living on the same Earth,’ he maintained.9
From the 17th century on, the Moderns believed that the separation between nature and culture, between objects and subjects, was real. They contended that ‘non-humans’ were things that were alien to us, even though they never stopped engaging with them. This is the sense in which ‘we have never been modern’, as Bruno proclaimed in his book of the same name.10
The living manufacture their own conditions of existence
But one discovery, possibly ‘as important as that of Galilleo in his time’,11 he said, was made by the British physiologist, chemist and engineer James Lovelock (1919–2022), author of Gaia, a New Look at Life on Earth:12 living beings make their own conditions of existence. The atmosphere is not given, homeostatic, but produced by all the living beings that populate the Earth, as affirmed in her turn by the microbiologist Lynn Margulis (1938–2011).
And so, we live on this varnish, this fine skin a few kilometres thick that covers the terrestrial globe and that certain scientists, like geochemist Jérôme Gaillardet, professor at the Institut de physique du globe, Paris, call ‘the critical zone’. An envelope on which we must now ‘land’, instead of living an uprooted existence, so as to maintain the conditions that make that envelope habitable, enabling life to continue. It’s this envelope to which Bruno gives the name Gaia, taking up a scientific hypothesis but also a myth that comes down to us from Ancient Greece and that refers to ‘the mother goddess’, matrix of all the deities.
For we have also changed cosmologies. The way we represent the world and the beings that surround us is no longer the same. In bringing planet Earth closer to the other celestial bodies, the Galilean revolution allowed us to go ‘from a closed world to the infinite universe’, as the philosopher of the sciences Alexandre Koyré (1892–1964) said.13 Galileo looked up to the sky, Lovelock looked down to the ground. ‘To complete the picture, we had to supplement Galileo’s Earth that moves with Lovelock’s Earth that is moved,’ as Bruno sums it up.
This is why his philosophy allows us to think about the ecological crisis anew. But also to act so as to ‘land on this new Earth’. How? Through self-description, which consists for each and every one of us as citizens in ‘describing not where you live, but who you live off’,14 and in mapping the territory you depend on. His model? The lists of grievances of the French Revolution which provided the Third Estate with an opportunity precisely to depict their territory and allowed them to catalogue the inequalities they suffered. Because ‘a people who know how to describe themselves are capable of reorienting themselves politically’.
His method? The inquiry, whose power he never ceased asserting and proving.15 A pragmatist as a person and an empiricist as a philosopher, he teamed up with the consortium ‘Où atterrir?’ after the ‘Gilets jaunes’ crisis, and led a series of self-description workshops in France in La Châtre (Indre), Saint-Junien (Haute-Vienne), Ris-Orangis (Essonne), and Sevran (Seine-Saint-Denis). ‘Who do you depend on to exist?’ proved to be the central question that needs to be asked to ‘go from inarticulate complaint to the grievance’, the query needed so as to form new alliances.
This art of questioning was condensed into a ‘questionnaire’ in the form of an aid to the self-description experiment and launched during the first lockdown. It had a resounding effect, opening as it does with a question that got a lot of confined people thinking: ‘What are some of the suspended activities that you would like to see not coming back?’16
A kind of collective thinking
‘Où atterrir? (Where do we land?) is a fundamental research device just like others this collective thinker has never ceased putting in place, such as two recent exhibitions he curated. One of these, ‘Critical Zones’, was put together at the ZKM in Karlsruhe in 2020 with the collaboration of Austrian artist Peter Weibel; the other, ‘Toi et moi, on ne vit pas sur la même planète’ (‘We don’t live on the same planet, you and I), was mounted at the Centre Pompidou Metz, with Martin Guinard and Eva Lin.
Composed of installations and performances intended not to illustrate an idea or to stage a philosophy but to produce a ‘thought experiment’, these two shows hooked other disciplines up to artistic practices in an association that promoted reflection on the new cosmology. ‘I don’t know how to solve certain questions I put to myself,’ Bruno liked to say, ‘so I appeal to experts who know more about it than I do, as well as to artists whose sensibility is very different, and the friction allows us to produce thought.’
It must be said that Bruno thinks in groups and reflects in teams, with the aid of collectives and collective experiments. Such as at Sciences Po, within several programmes he founded when he was the school’s scientific director (2007–12), including: Medialab, an interdisciplinary laboratory created in 2009 which conducts research on the relations between the digital and societies and is currently directed by sociologist Dominique Cardon; SPEAP, a school of political arts launched in 2010, now headed by historian of the sciences and playwright Frédérique Aït-Touati, who staged an impressive performance-reading of Bruno’s Moving Earths (2019).
Bruno also initiated an innovative masters course at Sciences Po, the Mapping Controversies project (or FORCCAST),17 designed to analyse the sciences and technologies, and first run by sociologist Nicolas Benvegnu. This aims to explore and visualize the complexity of public debates which mash together issues that are every bit as social as spatial, every bit as geographic as scientific, as in the case of the controversy over invasive plant species, which he recently seized on.
He also launched Terra Forma, piloted notably by Alexandra Arènes and Axelle Grégoire, two young architects who link the issue of the landscape to territorial policy. Not to mention, of course, the ‘Où atterrir?’ consortium, referred to above, in which Bruno worked, in particular, with the architect Soheil Hajmirbaba and composer Jean-Pierre Seyvos.
Work also went on at home en famille, with Chantal Latour, his wife, a musician, coordinator, mediator and artistic collaborator at S-composition, specializing in shared creative ateliers, and Chloé Latour, his daughter, a lawyer and theatre director who, along with Frédérique Aït-Touati, staged Bruno’s play Gaïa Global Circus (2013). ‘Not a firm, but a farm, with father, mother, and daughter,’ he used to joke, while his son Robinson, for his part, has been pursuing his career as a scriptwriter.
Society doesn’t exist
Watching Bruno co-animate these closely related groups and help map their attachments during sessions punctuated by moments of theatre and song was a gripping experience. For, despite his aura and his flashes of brilliance, the philosopher was never overbearing, but empathetic, attentive, totally immersed in these inquiries into our conditions of existence, these journeys of shared experiences.
If the collectives were so important to him, that was due to his conception of sociology, which he saw not as a science of the social, but as one of associations.18 ‘A society doesn’t hold together on account of some superstructure, the collective holds together through collectors,’ asserted the man behind actor-network theory,19 which, within the historiography of the social sciences, was closer to a sociology of description (close to Gabriel Tarde) than to a sociology of explanation (derived from Émile Durkheim).
In one of his last classes at the Collège de France, Michel Foucault argued that we had to ‘defend society’. Bruno explains that society doesn’t exist, that it’s not something given, and that we need ‘to see the social as the new association between surprising beings that come along and shatter the comfortable certainty of belonging to a common world’. This is because the social is constantly changing, so other terrains and other methods of inquiry are called for. Hence the centrality of his Enquête sur les modes d’existence,20 in which he demonstrates that there are several ‘regimes of truth’.
Bruno didn’t come to ecology via a practice as a naturalist or because of a strong penchant for wide open spaces and the wilderness, even if his Burgundian origins undoubtedly made him sensitive to the notions of terroir and territory. He came to it via the sociology of the sciences. In San Diego, at the Salk Institute, he had the luck to be there when endorphin was discovered by the team led by professor of endocrinology Roger Guillemin, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1977.
The main thing Bruno observes is ‘how an artificial place can establish accepted facts’. A long way from classical epistemology, he understands that science is a practice that doesn’t set nature against culture or certainty against opinion. Science is made of controversies; it is socially constructed.21
This heterodox ethnology of the sciences earned him the accusation of ‘relativism’, assuming he denied the existence of a scientific truth, whereas his sociology is ‘relationist’: it makes the connections between theoretical, empirical, social, and technical elements that allow us to attain a specific form of truth.
