Latour, Coronavirus, Public Health and the Role of the State

The reign of ancient Egyptian pharoah Akenhaten, the assassination of le bon roi Henri in the year 1610, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the gilets jaunes protests that took place in 2018 … Latour is a great thinker of moments of crisis. He diagnoses and interprets moments in history where shifts in societal thinking become apparent. But more than that, he is able to see where such moments are propitious, that is, where they hold out hope for something new to emerge.  

The coronavirus pandemic is palpably one such moment, albeit since the earliest days of lockdown Latour has been repeating his view that COVID-19 must really be understood as a shadow or forewarning of the greater crisis still to come, that is, the global environmental crisis.

This article, published a few weeks ago in Esprit, is a great place to start for those wishing to understand Latour’s thought on the signifcance of this particular moment. It can be added to others I have recently mentioned. Here, however, Latour goes further in showing how ecology can divide within social classes and how the state as yet lacks authority to pursue habitability and permaculture; its authority to tackle the disease as at present is really an old-fashioned authority that need renewing, resetting or refreshing from within civil society.

The article is at present only available in French, so here is a summary for those who are interested, with minor explanatory headings added in by me. I offer here simply a summary, with no comment of my own. I hope it is useful.

[start of summary]

The current health crisis is of such a dimension that it begins to give some small idea of the future crises that will surely be imposed by climate change.

How, then, should the state respond?

We have (more or less) gladly undergone drastic precautionary measures in response to the pandemic over the last few months.

But what if the nation-state (the apparatus of government) were to impose upon us equally drastic measures in relation to the environmental crisis?

The reality is that it is unlikely we would accept these measures! “Si l’on a accepté pour un temps de multiplier les « gestes barrières » à la contagion d’un virus, je ne suis pas sûr que l’on soit prêt à accepter du même État l’imposition de gestes barrières pour favoriser la santé de la planète!”

Why so?

A. The state and the pandemic

In relation to public health, we’ve become used to “trusting” the authority of the state: “quand il s’agit de santé et de protection de la vie, on bénéficie de plusieurs siècles derrière nous au cours desquels la société civile a pris l’habitude de s’en remettre à l’État et, en gros, malgré d’innombrables critiques, à lui faire confiance”. This is because over many centuries civil society has seen fit to cede this authority to the state, such that the state comes to be seen as having an almost maternal responsibility for its citizens. This is what Latour calls biopolitics 1 (a Foucauldian concept); the idea that the government manages the life, the number and the well-being of the populations over which it has rights.

B. The state and the environmental crisis

The situation is entirely different with the environmental crisis.

Here, it is the state that is often seen as an obstacle to the efforts of civil society to bring about change. Thus, there is no sense of a “general shared will” (“volonté générale partagée”) between the administrative apparatus of the state and the public on this issue, since neither share common conceptions (“ne partagent des conceptions communes”) of what should be done:

The government’s current ‘software’ is out of step with the new task of exploration necessary to cope with ecological change. As a result, every decision of the state is in radical or partial conflict with the needs of the transition. For these new issues, the administration can therefore in no way play the role of paternal management and give reliable directions to its “sheep”.

Thus, while civil society agrees to delegate to the state as protective (maternal) role in relation to public health, it has not yet decided to offer the state this same authority to help it through the even larger transformation represented by the environmental crisis.

But this negative loop is caused by the fact that civil society does not have precise and general idea about its “will” either. It is therefore impossible for civil society to delegate to the state the task of implementing what it wants because it does not know it itself.

To make progress, we must distinguish between:

• “Biopolitics 1” (as described above); a form of contract where civil society accepts a certain degree of coercion in return for public health assurance.
• “Biopolitics 2”; this would extend the notion of the well-being of human populations to include the much broader conditions that allow humans to exist (to breathe, to grow, to prosper in an environment). This is what has not (yet) been ceded or agreed.

For biopolitics 2 to develop, we would need to extent to politics a notion that is already quite familiar in scientific ecology: “habitabilité”. This idea is developed in the recent article Latour co-wrote with Tim Lenton and Sébastien Dutreuil, “Life on Earth is Hard to Spot”, The Anthropocene Review (2020), and is further explored in the upcoming volume edited by Latour and Peter Weibel, Critical Zones: The Science and Politics of Landing on Earth. This describes how an environment conducive to life is created by waste products and the discharge of other living things.

The idea of habitability obviously challenges “biopolitics 1”, where the state adopts a public health attitude to attack microbes by vaccines or drugs.

But it is, in spite of everything, where the new and future protective duty of any state that claims to ensure the good life of its citizens in the future lies.

What kind of mechanism could the state adopt to pursue this new form of biopolitics?

One must work from a completely different idea of the relationship between the state and the general will. After all, the general will is difficult to discern and may change. And the state is only a provisional and revisable tool that civil society has the right to change when the questions it has worked on for a long time become too long or too complicated to be dealt with satisfactorily.

For example:

• Civil society might suddenly give up taking it upon itself to describe its own situation and rely instead on the state to steer it in the right direction: this would equate to a depoliticization from below (“il y a dépolitisation générale par le bas”). 
• Or the government, believing itself to be the infallible guardian of the general interest, imagines that it can resolve by itself the issues entrusted to it without ensuring that civil society takes over: this would equate to a depoliticization from above (“il y a dépolitisation par le haut”).

In France, as in other countries, “depoliticization from below” and “depoliticization from above” have jointly emptied the procedures that would make it possible to explore the general will on these subjects.

Latour refers to this as “the conditioned reflexes of a form of phantom politics”: we address ourselves vertically to a state that does not exist complaints that come from our own inability to connect horizontally to one another.

So there must be a constant adjustment between civil society’s exploration of the matters that concern it and the government’s application of the powers that society has delegated to it. Or, to put it in other terms, the state must receive a political charge from civil society to do its bidding. Latour describes this with the term “recharger”. 

Another way of putting this is that civil society has to construct for itself a common representation (“une représentation commune”) of what it wants to change, and then share how it wants the government administration to take on tasks of implementation, monitoring, evaluation and possible rectification of this representation.

Latour calls this “the work of civil society upon itself to find out what it wants” (“ce travail de la société civile sur elle-même pour savoir ce qu’elle desire”).

This work of representation is made harder by the globalised world in which we live:

The tragedy is that citizens, politically drained by fifty years of globalisation, used to addressing the state of Reason as the only possible interlocutor for their anxieties, reinforced by the acceleration of social networks that give the impression of expressing themselves when they often only transport the same products to the chain in fake news factories somewhere in Siberia, no longer have any reference points to decide who they are, where they are, against whom and with whom.

This is where we need to abandon the far too simplistic notion of “civil society”, and certainly that of “social class” or “class struggle”, and replace it with the idea of the “geosocial” (“les nouveaux conflits de classe que nous appelons géosociaux”). This term encompasses the relation of all people to place, soil, land and land use.

The distinction between the concepts of “social class” and “geosocial class” is the same type as that between “biopolitics one” and “biopolitics two”:

• In the old mode of “class struggle”, there was an assumption that “production” had to continue (even if the ownership of the means of production had to change). This is the claim of Pierre Charbonnier’s recent book: Abondance et liberté. Une histoire environnementale des idées politiques (especially the chapters on Marx and Polanyi), which I am currently reading myself.
• But with the concept of the “geosocial”, this changes completely: here, the idea is “to ensure the maintenance of the subsistence conditions of all participants necessary for human habitability”.

This frames a debate between (A) various land and labour uses versus (B) existential conflicts over the definition of what prosperity is and what humans are. Think of a person supporting a Parisien out-of-town development for reasons of work, who finds himself misaligned with people from his own “social class” who contest it for environmental reasons. As far as Latour is concerned, the small salary distributed for a time by a Chinese investor in a giant supermarket does not carry the same weight as maintaining the conditions that generate a plethora of living beings in the Île-de-France region.

But how are we to measure this?

There is no common metric to measure the relative weight of the interests of these two activists who are equally engaged, one in a class conflict, the other in a geosocial class conflict.

In order to begin to imagine constructing these metrics that would make it possible to weigh the contradictory interests of the different actors and thus to modify what are called “power relations” there is no other solution than to go through the process of “description” and “representation” mentioned above. This is “the only way to situate citizens in the material conditions of dependence and subsistence on which they depend”.

The purpose of “revolution” (insofar as that word applies to Latour) is now no longer to seize the means of production, but to seize the “subsistence surplus” (“le surplus de subsistance”) captured up to now by those who occupy the land and sterilize the conditions of engendering that others are trying to save and defend.

[End of summary]