Latour’s Où suis-je?: Summary of Chapter 2

My previous post began my chapter-by-chapter exploration of Latour’s wonderful new book, Où suis-je? Leçons du confinement à l’usage des terrestres.

In the second chapter, entitled ‘Confinés en un lieu quand même assez vaste’, Latour shows how the model described in that first chapter, the self-regulating construction of a habitable space, applies to different scales of “outside”: a city, a mountain, the social world, and finally to the Critical Zone of the Earth itself.

The city

To live in a city is to occupy a networked space whose “channels” spread out deep around us. Whether we conceive of these channels figuratively, or as some more material network (like the London Underground tube system), it remains the case that the spread of the city is like a termitary: “la ville est l’exosquelette de ses habitants, comme les habitants laissent derrière eux un habitat dans leurs sillages” (18).

In this description, Latour is drawing heavily on his magnificent earlier book: Paris: Ville Invisible.

The city is almost an organic extension of our own activities. And if the human is removed from this space, which of course is precisely what happened for so many town centres during the pandemic, it no longer has the feel of a city. Thus, “la ville […] émane de ses habitants” (23).

The Vercors Massif

But can we move out of the city to find something that is truly external to us: “rencontrer quelque chose qui soit vraiment dehors” (19)?

Latour recollects the teaching of a geologist friend at le Grand Veymont, a mountain in the Vercors range that has an impressive Urgonian limestone cliff face.

Urgonian carbonate is a lithostratigraphic unit of rock in this area that was formed in the Early Cretaceous when high sea-levels permitted the deposition of carbonates rich in corals and rudists (reef-building organisms). These are called bioclasts: skeletal fossil fragments of once living marine or land organisms laid down in a marine environment, especially in limestone varieties around the globe. This rock therefore constitutes “une autre conurbation géante, depuis longtemps désertée par ses habitants” (19), engendered by “un long travail d’astuce et d’ingénierie d’animalcules innombrables” (20).

Interim conclusion: both environments (the urban landscape described above and this mountain face) are like termitaries: they have been constructed from within by their inhabitants.

Gregor’s labour

We deduce from the narrative of Kafka’s Metamorphosis that Gregor, whom Latour has already introduced in the first chapter above, must have been already alienated in significant ways … from his family, from his colleagues and especially from his mode of labour.

But what is amazing is that once he becomes metamorphosed, he discovers a new form of productive labour. He arranges the clothes and furniture in his room. He literally regurgitates food (which he uses as a sort of cement) in such a way as to mould the environment he inhabits to his personal taste.

Thus, although he remains confined to his room, he regains his freedom: “le confiné se déconfine à merveille. Il commence à retrouver une grande liberté de mouvement” (20).

The walker on the mountain

To ascend le Grand Veymont a pedestrian is likewise engaged in this sort of circulating labour, breathing oxygen offered by atmospheric processes and contributing in return a footstep of carbon dioxide. She is “la piétonne d’une metropole immense qu’elle a parcourue une belle apres-midi” (21) and “logée au-dedans d’une conurbation qu’elle ne pourrait jamais quitter sans aussitôt mourir asphyxiée” (21).

Agency processes

By broadening our horizon (from the city, to mountain, to individual human walker) we can begin to see that these processes are carried out by all sorts of actors. These might be “des travailleurs”, “des animalcules” or “des agencements subtils” (22). The point of unification is that they are all agents that have “la capacité à changer autour d’eux leurs conditions d’existence, à élaborer des niches, des spheres, des ambiances, des bulles d’air conditionné” (22).

Nature as constructed, not providential

We can better understand the condition of “nature” if we understand it as subtended by actors, rather than by (mute) organisms: “elle est surtout composée d’artifices et d’artificiers” (22).

This enables us to avoid the myth of providence that suggests the conditions for life were fine-tuned by “good fortune” (22), “une version si providentielle de l’accord entre les organismes et leur environnement, comes ils dissent” (23). This would be like congratulating the termite or the ant for the fine-tuned conditions of their termitary or ant-colony. What a nonsense!

On the contrary, were we to say that, these insects would surely reply that “c’est elle et les milliards de ses congéneres qui ont émis cet ‘environnement’ qui sort d’elles” (23). And this holds for all environments: “ce sont les vivants qui l’ont rendue favorable à leurs desseins” (23).

Islands

Latour cites the stories of his childhood (such as Jules Verne’s L’Île mystérieuse), where shipwrecked people would first mount to the highest point to ascertain where they were located and to gain their bearings. They are reassured when they realise that the edges of their environment can be spied from the centre.

Similarly, we too are disorientated at the moment, but there is comfort in knowing that the further edges of our environment are still accessible, that “nous devinons le bord depuis l’intérieur, par transparence en quelque sorte” (24). This is the definition of scientific knowledge (to use the language of the Inquiry, that is knowledge in the mode of REF), that is, we look outwards via numerous connections that link us to the “dehors” (23)

The inside and the outside

The inside (“le dedans”), then, is defined as the space that is subject to all these agency configurations, whether it happens to be near to us or far from us in space. This is the space of the Earth, “l’en deçà Terre” (26), and those who inhabit it are “les terrestres” (26): “c’est avec eux que je cherche à entrer en relation lançant mes appels” (26).

It is important to note that “terrestres” does not describe a “type” of thing (such as humans, viruses, animals), “mais seulement une manière de se localiser en déclinant la série d’ascendants et de descendants dont les soucis d’engendrement se croisent un instant” (44).

The only thing that would be outside this space would be that which is beyond the space of the Earth, which we might call the wider universe, “l’univers” (26). This links back to the opening chapter, where we had a guilty desire to look beyond the fragility of existence on Earth in order to sense the stability of the Moon. But although we may know a lot about the universe we do not have “l’expérience directe” (26) of it. That is reserved for the space of the Earth, the Critical Zone we occupy. It is to those who inhabit this space, “les terrestres”, that Latour will offer advice in the rest of this book.

Latour’s Où suis-je?: Summary of Chapter 1

In recent weeks I have been tweeting chapter-by-chapter summaries of Latour’s new book, Où suis-je? Leçons du confinement à l’usage des terrestres. This book is important, I think, because it provides a summary and expansion of a number of articles Latour has recently posted on the pandemic and lockdown, continuing the work of applying the philosophy of “the new climactic regime” to our global political situation (his two most recent long works, including Down to Earth as well as this book, can increasingly be seen as an application to politics and society of his 2015 Face à Gaïa).

A number of people have asked me to post these unwieldy twitter threads here on my blog. In doing so, I have done not much more than fill in some of the original tweets, providing (I hope) readable summaries. In each case, I will not necessarily offer commentary or analysis. I hope this series serves as an introduction to this wonderful book, perhaps for those who do not yet read the French.

The first chapter, Un Devenir-Termite, sets the scene for the novel analysis of the lockdown that Latour will go on to provide.

Lockdown

We come back outside, as if after a long confinement, searching for our bearings.

We cannot bear to cast our eyes towards natural phenomena, the sun, the trees or the landscape in front of us. Not merely because our eyes have become unaccustomed to the outside world during lockdown, but rather because we sense the damage we have inflicted upon it through our own activities in the Anthropocene.

But it seems that we do feel comfortable looking at the moon. Why? Because, perhaps only symbolically, its movement is beyond the reach of our activities: “au moins, il ne se sent pas du tout responsible” (10); “de son mouvement, enfin, tu te sais innocent” (10). That is to say, the moon remains the closest object that is far enough away not to be changed by human activity: “elle est le seul être proche qui soit extérieur à ses soucis” (14). The moon therefore retains an innocence that has been squandered with regard to our own planet.

Kafka’s metamorphosis

To come out of lockdown (itself, as we have seen, a metaphor for coming-to-our-senses with regard to our environmental impact) is to awake from slumber like Gregor Samsa, becoming grimly aware of the monstrous form we now inhabit, and sensing the difficulty of inhabiting the world outside in the same way we did before: “c’est comme si j’avais subi, moi aussi, une vraie metamorphose” (11).

How does this analogy work?

Previously, like Gregor, we might have through we could occupy our own bodies innocently: “je pouvais me déplacer innocement en emportant mon corps avec moi” (11). But now, our bodies have become outward and visible signs of a monstrous metamorphosis.

In the same way, we are beginning to awake to the metamorphosis we have imposed on the world out-there:

• Our bodies have become “monstrous” in the sense that we have carried behind us a trail of our own atmospheric emissions and pollutants, a disgusting sight for those who had “eyes to see”.
• And now, in a more obvious sense, we also carry behind us the trail of the virus, threatening to infect others in a more palpable but no lless devastating way.

We emit our “sillages de virus et de gaz” (12); “derrière comme d’avant, c’est comme une carapace de conséquences chaque jour plus affreuses que je dois apprendre à trainer” (11).

And yet, rather than just passing away, we must learn to adapt, as falteringly as necessary, to this new existence, accepting that we are “dans un autre temps, quelqu’un d’autre, membre d’un autre peuple” (12).

Termites

Kafka’s insect image points us to the idea of termites whose termitaries are described as super-organisms because the termites form part of a self-regulating entity: the colony itself. The termites are restricted to the space of the termitary, but can extend themselves further in tht tthat they build outwards; the termitary thus becomes a type of exoskeleton or “corps étendu, en quelque sorte” (13).

Termitary

Part of the burden of this book is to describe and explain and explain the “termite-being” that we must acknowledge and own if we are to face the devastating and urgent challenge of the Anthropocene:

• Humans too are those who construct and extend outwards the interior of their habitable space: “tu en as fait ton milieu intérieur, ta termitière, ta ville” (14).
• Of course, we feel ill-at-ease with this idea, as described in the feelings of the one exiting lockdown above (14).
• But we should not! We are like Gregor and should not feel we cannot exit our room in shame and horror at our modus operandi: “avec tes antennes, tes articulations, tes émanations, tes déchets, tes mandibules, tes prostheses, tu deviens peut- être enfin un humain!” (14). It is the other characters in the story (the parents, the sister, the awful manager who drops in to find out why Gregor is late) who have refused to become human; they should opine who they are and what they have become (15). Thus, we must read the story the other way around: “remis sur ses six pattes velues, Gregor, enfin, marcherait droit et pourrait nous apprendre à nous extraire du confinement” (15).

This self-regulating construction of a habitable space (which Latour calls “ce devenir-insecte, ce devenir-termite”, 14) is the antidote to those who feel their only resort these days is to gaze at the moon in despair at the climate crisis down-here. He is “ce Gregor don’t le devenir-insecte préfigure le nôtre” (27).      

In other words, Latour has presented us once again with his appeal to “retour à la terre” (15).

Can the Concept of Gaia be Redeemed for Biology and Earth System Science?

For some, the announcement of the arrival of the Anthropocene has sounded the death-knell for serious consideration of the concept of Gaia. After all, if there is anything that the end of the Holocene demonstrates, it is that the homeostatic stabilisation mechanisms that are enacted in Gaia to regulate habitable conditions for life on Earth have been decisively overwhelmed by the destabilising effects of human-induced activity. [1] What further use can there be for Gaia, then?

But don’t speak too soon. For this forthcoming article in The Anthropocene Review, “Life on Earth is Hard to Spot” (Timothy Lenton, Sébastian Dutreuil and Bruno Latour) makes a case for the ongoing value of the concept of Gaia to the disciplinary fields of biology and Earth System Science (ESS), and to philosophical and theological speculative thought in general.

In broad terms, the authors argue that the productive deployment of the concept of Gaia within the natural sciences has been in eclipse not because of the arrival of the Anthropocene as a fundamental paradigm disrupter, but because “different scientific disciplines have persistently missed the extraordinary and variable influence of Life on the Earth”. Here, the term “Life” (with a capital “L”) is being used in contradistinction to the word “life” or “living beings”. By referring to “life” or “living beings”, biologists and Earth system scientists have construed the biotic component of Gaia too narrowly; what is addressed is this particular living thing as a subset of other living things. The authors suggest this sort of error is found, for example, in “niche construction theory” (pace Lalande), whose examples of adaptive environmental effects are drawn from an overly-localized empirical field: the building of nests and burrows by these particular animals or the alternation of nutrient cycling by those particular plants, for example. No doubt, there is certainly more work needed to formulate and substantiate this accusation.[2] But conceptually the authors of this article wish to contrast this narrow definition of “life” with their own concept of “Life” (with a capital “L”). Here, “Life” denotes the “total ensemble of all living beings”. There are no subsets or genera of “Life”. The context in which “Life” operates is only the abiotic. “Life”, then, becomes a suitable candidate for the role of biotic partner in homeostatic regulatory processes of the sort identified by Lovelock and Margulis. Or, to put it another way, the formula “Life + abiotic environment” can be taken as an apt definition for the mechanism of Gaia.

The bulk of the article goes on to provide a sort of genealogy of the category errors that have been made by confusing “life” with “Life”. By focusing their study on the physical systems of the Earth (biogeochemistry, climatology, oceanography, solid Earth geophysics and so on), ESS, for example, failed to see how the negative entropy of the Earth’s heat exchange had to pass through “Life”. The article points out that, for many Earth system scientists, the raw logic of their work would lead them to posit a “Mars system” as analogous to that of the Earth system, even though there are no living beings on that planet. “Life” indeed! This is an ironic inversion of Lovelock’s original insight about life on Mars made whilst he worked at the JET Propulsion Centre in Pasadena, California. It shows how a basic misapprehension of what constitutes biota has slipped in to ESS. The article provides similar diagnoses of the assumptions lying behind the Earth system models of NASA and the IGBP.

By positing “Life” as the most accurate definition of the biotic component of the Earth, then, the article argues for a redemption of the concept of Gaia within biology and ESS. And yes, even its teleological pretensions! This is where the article gets interesting for political theology. For one of the key reasons why Gaia theory has been dismissed is on account of its invocation of goal functions and the apparent purposiveness that seems to indicate. Conceptually, the very notion of teleology was thought to imply a consciousness that biologists believed could in no way be attributed to the Earth system. How can this be reconciled?

The article merely hints at an answer to this question. But the crucial point is this: Lovelock introduced ideas of feedback, self-regulation, homeostasis and goal-seeking behaviour from the field of cybernetics. The type of functional talk upon which he was drawing does not imply norms: it does not specify what the entity should do in this particular system. Insofar as biologists defer from the teleological implications of Gaian mechanisms, then, the error (so this article claims) comes not from the side of Gaia theory, but from the intellectual history of biology itself. As the authors put it: “the issue of teleology […] is embedded within discussions from 18th century natural theology, where the functions of organs within organisms or of species at the surface of the Earth were designed by God or where the apparent design of a biological entity was used to prove the existence of God”. So there is a political-theological aetiology to biologists’ own critiques of Gaia as teleological.

I think there is great potential in this suggestion. But more work is needed here to show what is meant. How and when did the biological sciences imbibe a concept of teleology that originated in theistic, rationalistic proofs for the existence of God? The article ends with this plea:

Two issues merit further discussion which we leave for further papers: a more detailed history of ESS and its relationship with Gaia, and a serious discussion of Gaia’s teleology, linking the theoretical efforts developed by the Gaian scientific community with philosophical debates on causality and on the way Gaia has changed what we mean by ‘life’.

There is much to be said here. And I will take up aspects of this challenge in my forthcoming book: The Political Theology of Bruno Latour.

But one text that will certainly be useful in this regard is that of French epistemologist of science Philippe Huneman, whose 2008 book Métaphysique et biologie Kant et la constitution du concept d’organisme shows how Kantian notions of “regulatory principle” and “natural end” fed into the early stages of the development of the discipline of biology and inclined it to a certain understanding of teleology.

So more work needs to be done.

But this is an important intervention in the field of Gaia Studies, drawing attention to the value the concept retains at the time of the Anthropocene.

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[1]  A classic statement of this is Crutzen PJ (2004), ‘Anti-Gaia’, in: Steffen W, Sanderson A, Tyson P et al. (eds) Global Change and the Earth System: A Planet Under Pressure. Berlin: Springer, p. 72.

[2]  Is it really the case that evolutional biology can be arraigned for being neglectful of the category of “Life”? Much of this claim rests on a prior argument made by one of the authors, cf. Dutreuil & Pocheville (2015), ‘Les organismes et leur environnement: la construction de niche, l’hypothese Gaia et la selection naturelle’, Bulletin d’histoire et d’epistemologie des sciences de la vie, 22: 27–56.

If you need a “way-in” to Latour’s writing on religion….

Here is an excellent short introduction to the theology of Latour by the ever-wonderful John Reader: do check it out.

Latour and the non-space and non-time of Modernity (part 3 of 3)

This is the third of a three-part series. See here for parts one and two.

Just like the concept of “utopia”, the concept of “achronia” (literally “being without time”) functions in an equivalent way for Latour.

Globalization not only dislocates or displaces human beings in space, but it also does so in time, interjecting them into what Latour calls an experience of “temporal aridity” (see here). To put it another way, since the globalization project presents itself as an inevitable forward march in history, it does not brook a social imaginary that might lead to alternative futures than the one it prescribes. Globalization is a drama-free zone.

Those who inhabit Modernity therefore inhabit a world whose flow of time has already been determined. The present moment, with its rich potential to be the crucible of something wholly new and emergent, is held in abeyance. It is not too far to suggest that the time of globalization is ‘without time’, because it is envisaged as proceeding along a temporal grid that nothing and no-one can alter, as if its ultimate triumph was guaranteed by some kind of sovereign diktat. The ability of local actors to represent and define an account of the world by means of ‘trials’, which themselves take place in the flow of time from past to present to future, is foreclosed. “l’histoire peut avancer plus lentement que prévu; mais elle ne peut pas radicalement changer de direction. Au sens propre, la cause que nous servons est transcendante à l’histoire” (my translation: “history may advance more slowly than you expected; but it cannot change its direction in a radical way. In the literal sense, the cause we serve transcends history”, see here, pp.232).

So what are we to conclude?

For Latour, the concepts of utopia and achronia describe the framework within which contemporary Western existence is invariably contained. Within this framework, the contingencies of the present are over-determined by a spatio-temporal conditioning effect that is imposed ‘from above’. For Latour, this is instantiated even in the contemporary phenomenon of globalization, concerning which he offers the revisionist interpretation that it is not so much an organic, interconnected network as it is a regressive, hegemonic grid. To be globalized is to engage in a continual flight away from the world ‘down below’ in the vain attempt to find a space that will be free from interference and a history whose end has already been guaranteed. The ideological and teleological structure that undergirds this is essentially religious, because it is derived by proxy with a realm of transcendence and with the attributes credited to the being of God by classical theism. As Graham Ward has pointed out: “globalization, like secularization, is proving to be an ideology—that is, a myth masquerading as natural law, even divine providence” (Ward, 2008, ‘Religion after Democracy’, p.203). Latour’s critique thus stands alongside other recent evaluations of globalization as a religious phenomenon, especially Hardt and Negri’s Empire (2000) and Commonwealth (2009).

Translation of ‘Facing Gaia’ is now due

Hooray, here at last is the promise of the English translation of ‘Facing Gaia’, some time in 2017.

Before then, if you want my own potted summary, find it here.