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.