Review of McCarraher (2020), “The Enchantments of Mammon”

Here is a short review I have written of the monumental intellectual history of global capital by Eugene McCarraher.

Lesser-Known Pieces by Latour on Religion and Spirituality: Part 1

Latour’s own site is obviously the first port-of-call to access any of his resources. In fact, I can’t emphasise enough how much is available there; it’s hard to think of another contemporary philosopher who curates his own content with such rigour and makes it as freely available.

That said, to an unusual degree his work is spread across different media, ranging from newspaper articles to museum catalogue entries, and from lecture notes to manuscripts of interviews, and this can make it hard to keep up to date with the full range of what he has written.

I try to keep a full bibliography on Latour’s work in all its guises (and always appreciate a heads-up if you find an obscure interview or opinion piece somewhere: do send me a note on timhowles@outlook.com or @AIMETim). And so with that in mind I thought it might be interesting to have an occasional series on this blog, introducing and offering some thoughts on items from his backlist that you may have missed.

One of the proudest moments of my life was my first meeting with Latour, which took place at my own university, the London School of Economics, on 24th October 2014. Latour had come over to engage in a debate with Rowan Williams on the topic of religion and the environment. My doctoral supervisor, Graham Ward, had organised a personal meeting for me. It was a cold, miserable morning, and I remember travelling down from Oxford to London on the train with some trepidation. I didn’t know what to expect. But Bruno couldn’t have been more accommodating. He gave two hours of his time, graciously talking me through his thoughts on The Inquiry, on Rejoicing and on Factish Gods, among many other things. It was absolutely fascinating; one of the great privileges of my life actually. Since then, it’s been wonderful to have continued in communication with him in various ways. Latour is the ultimate “collegial” thinker and (from what I’ve heard) he always has time to offer to anyone interested. It’s a great tribute to him.

One funny story, if I may. Latour was so generous with his time that he invited me to join him for a coffee after our interview, but before the debate itself. I scanned the road for the best-looking coffee shop and found a smart, indie place up the road. We queued. When I got to the counter, I ordered first: “latte, please”, I said. I quickly realised my mistake as this French connoisseur spied with disdain the milky drink that was passed over to me!

The debate itself is available on YouTube. I did make a full transcription from that video which I then used in my own research. But I was delighted to find the full dialogue published recently as a chapter in this book, Religion and the Public Sphere: New Conversations, edited by James Walters and Esther Kersley. To be honest I hadn’t been aware of this volume when it was first published in 2018; it’s amazing how important pieces by Latour can escape the radar of even the keenest reader! But it’s great to have it available in this form.

The dialogue between Williams and Latour is found in chapter 4, entitled “Religion and the Environment”. I remember the event vividly from my seat in the audience; an extraordinary back-and-forth between two of the great thinkers of our generation. Latour’s contribution focuses on some of his work on the Anthropocene as it had developed in 2014 (which feels like a long time ago now, of course). Among other things, it is particularly noteworthy for his discussion of the idea of “apocalypse”. For Latour (and Williams agrees with him on this point) the disjunction between the strong command posed to us by the climate science data (“you must change your lives, or else catastrophe!”) and the failure of individuals, societies and governments to heed this warning can be explained by the idea that the apocalypse is surely “behind us”. The narrative of progress modernitycelebrates is towards a future whose essential form has already been revealed. The apocalyptic injunctions emanating from the climate scientists, then, which are then relayed through the media and other channels, is hard to assimilate with this narrative. To the extent that modern people can conceive of a cataclysmic event at all, they are at best able to posit it as something that has already taken place and that has been assimilated, and not as something that may still lie ahead. Thus, to all extents and purposes they live “après l’Apocalypse” (Facing Gaia, p.252). This has an effect upon their understanding of time, their sense of being in the world, and their conception of history:

Les modernes se disent désormais absolument certains d’avoir atteint la fin des temps, d’être parvenu dans un autre monde, et d’être séparés des temps anciens par une rupture absolue.
[The moderns] tell themselves henceforth that they are absolutely certain they have reached the end of time,have arrived in another world, and are separated from the times of old by an absolute rupture.
Latour, Face à Gaïa, (2015), p.253

Modern people believe that the essential trajectory of their own future, the arrow of progress we are all moving along, has already been set (even if minor adjustments and set-backs are likely to occur along the way). They can no more envisage disruption to this trajectory than a religious believer can envisage the flow of history somehow slipping away from the control of a sovereign God. For Latour, this is the reason why the scale and likely impact of the contemporary environmental crisis has yet to gain its full traction. If we live “après l’Apocalypse”, our capacity for action will be substantially reduced. We will hear the apocalyptic injunction. But we will lack the requisite motivation to respond, no matter how well-informed and convinced we may be about the reliability of the science that undergirds it.

What is needed, then, is a reclaimed understanding of history as that which is fragile and composed, and a renewed sense of our own cautious and attentive agency in contributing to the survival of planetary existence into the future.

The appreciative words of Anna Tsing, a fellow academic and collaborator with Latour on other texts and articles, are worth noting. These come from a different article, but they reflect much of what I felt that day at the LSE:

Let me say first how much I loved it when you, Bruno, talked about the apocalyptic in these lectures. For me this was a revelation. Because I had until then always experienced the term ‘apocalypse’ as a punishment. It was used to tell people: ‘you cannot go there because you are being apocalyptic!’ And being apocalyptic was not amenable to being an academic in many ways. And then you came along in these lectures and said: ‘yes, OK, apocalyptic is a trope. But why not use that trope?’
Latour, with Stengers et al (2018), Anthropologists are Talking, p.18.

Watch this space for more posts like this on “forgotten” or “buried” pieces of Latour’s work on religion and spirituality.

Announcement of New Book

I’m very pleased to announce that I have signed a contract with Edinburgh University Press to publish a monograph entitled The Political Theology of Bruno Latour: Secularization, Globalization and Environmental Crisis.

I’ve worked on Latour’s thoughts about religion and its application to the contemporary world for some years now, and so it’s a great pleasure to have the opportunity to publish these with EUP. I’m going to be using this blog to keep you informed about progress and (hopefully) to run some ideas past you. Please do feel free to contact me if you have anything ideas you’d like to contribute, either via this blog, on twitter (@AIMETim) or Email (timhowles@hotmail.com).

To get things going, I’m going to start with a short series of posts on “little-known” texts by Latour that feature or address the theme of religion. Keep your eyes peeled for the first of those soon.

A New Resource on Political Theology

I’m very pleased to announce a new initiative from the William Temple Foundation: Temple Continental: Philosophers for our Time.

This new series aims to address the growing interest in a range of Continental thinkers, prompted, not least, by the so-called ‘theological turn’ that has taken place in various strands of recent philosophy. For theologians, these thinkers can seem to be esoteric, voluminous and sometimes even openly hostile towards religion. But this series aims to provide accessible introductions to their work: synthesising their most important ideas, defining their key terms and explaining why their work is relevant to current theology.

The first in this new series, launched today, has been written by me. It focusses on a specific twentieth century debate between the political theorist Carl Schmitt and the theologian Erik Peterson. This was a key moment in the formulation of the field of “political theology” as we know it today. I’ll be posting more about this debate in future posts, but for now:

Download the tract for free here    

Future tracts will address contemporary thinkers such as Peter Sloterdijk, Bernard Stiegler and Isabelle Stengers—as well as setting forth new thinking on some of the most urgent topics of our time.

Latour and the Resetting of the Economy

In recent weeks, Latour has offered thoughts on the coronavirus crisis in various ways and in various places: in English see here and here, and in French see here. In particular, he has posed a number of questions about its potential impact, for better or for worse, on our “global intuition” (to borrow a phrase that was actually used by Michel Serres in their 1990 conversation here): Latour asks not only about the events we have experienced, but also about how our experience has been changed by these events. This is of course the key question of Latour’s entire philosophical project,¹ as framed so eloquently in the Inquiry:

We want nothing but experience, to be sure, but also nothing less than experience. (AIME, p.178)

I was glad to have had the opportunity to translate another of these articles last week, which you can now find posted on Latour’s website here. By comparison with the various articles noted above, some of which have been widely shared, I think this actually provides a particularly expansive, and yet also charming and readable, example. It can be read profitably in association with the chapters on “oikonomia” in the Inquiry, but also alongside the wonderful and under-appreciated booklet Latour wrote with Vincent Antonin Lépinay, The Science of Passionate Interests: An Introduction to Gabriel Tarde’s Economic Anthropology, which was published in 2009.

Throughout his work, Latour has attempted to show how the unity of capitalist logic and the teleology of capitalist history functions as a transcendent epistemological category comparable to what he has previously described as “Nature”.² In fact, he refers to global capitalism as “the Second Nature” (AIME, p.383), so as to indicate its functional equivalence. The idea is as follows. For Latour, the ideology of neoliberalism has caused the operation of global capital to be elevated to the same order as that of inert matter: both are taken as fixed and obligatory realities that are entirely independent of the contingent behaviour of human beings in the world down-below. To illustrate this, he is fond of citing the quip of Frederick Jameson: “nowadays it seems easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism”. Just like the concept of “Nature”, then, global capitalism has become the de facto metaphysical backdrop to all human activity: instead of the laws of nature, there are the laws of economics or the law of market forces whose operation is perceived to be just as immutable, just as necessary and just as fixed as the operation of gravity upon a falling object. The choices available to homo œconomicus are framed by the idea that, come what may, the “iron laws” of the economy must prevail. The idea of the oikonomia as representing the fully rational and obligatory order of things has a long intellectual heritage of course, deriving from Stoic ideas of the cosmos as that which is “economized” by divine providence or by nature herself, and finding contemporary expression in post-Heideggerian critiques of the technologized global economy as a “supercomputer” that has become supervenient over the human beings whose interests it is supposed to serve. Agamben, with his theological critique of oikonomia, would be a contemporary example of this. Building on this heritage, Latour shows how the global economy is nothing but another iteration of this political epistemology, and that it ends up depoliticizing the plural world in an equivalent way to other transcendent concepts like that of “Nature”.

In light of that context, see how Latour begins this article: “it would certainly be a shame to lose too quickly all the benefit of what COVID-19 has revealed to be essential”. His point, then, is that the coronavirus crisis presents a potential moment of reset of the economy. Why? First, because “it seems that it can be suspended in one fell swoop”. The economy no longer looks like the necessary and ineluctable framework to all our existence. Rather, we know understand that it is under the control, even under the management, of politicians. Second, because the lockdown has generated new awareness of social relations and connectivity. We can see now that the values inculcated by the operation of market forces are skewed and unjust: “we have begun to notice a thousand qualities in less well-paid, less well-regarded jobs, the very ones demanding care, attention and multiple precautions”, as he puts it.

And so:

We knew already that something is wrong with the economy; that has not started with the virus. Yes, yes, but what is more insidious is that we are now saying that something is wrong in the way the economy defines the world. When we say that “the economy has to start up again”, we ask ourselves: “but actually, why? Is that really such a good idea?”

This sets the stage for a penetrating analysis of the way the economy has become “detached” from human experience, and from the multitude of social and organisational links that bind us together, humans and nonhumans alike. In its place, the opportunity opens up for a new kind of formatting, one in which we realise that, rather than simply “waging war” on microbes in an attempt to triumph over the virus (what does that even mean?), we must instead learn to understand the complex ways in which we must manage, by give and by take, our relations with these invisible co-existents. A new formatting is required. The restart of the economy must take place in this mode of sensitivity and attentiveness to the real and embedded relations of all things. (Incidentally, it is interesting that the term in French for the “restart” of the economy is “Reprise”, as term which, in a completely different register, is highly significant in Latour’s understanding of religion; more on that to follow).

Propitiously, we already have a precedent for this, says Latour. For the contemporary environmental crisis provides a scaled-up model of the sort of reset that is needed after the COVID-19 lockdown. To come out of lockdown and to restart the economy, we will have to make use of lessons learned from our previous experience of environmental crisis. But more importantly, if we are to tackle the true crisis threatening humanity, namely, our planetary survival, we will have to make use of lessons learned from the last three months.

By way of David Graeber, Jim Carrey and stories about his ten-year old grandson, I highly recommend a read of this article!

The pandemic provides this surprising lesson: where we thought we could wage war on the virus, instead we have to learn to live with it with the least detriment to ourselves; where we thought we should have an Economic Recovery, instead we will probably have to learn to exit from the Economy, that simplified summary of forms of life.

Notes:

1. For an interesting consideration of Latour’s debt to Jamesian pragmatism, see here.  
2. For some useful texts, see Mirowski (2014), Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown and Slobodian, (2018), Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism.