Anthropocene Lecture: Bruno Latour

[Applause] many songs I will speak in English unfortunately for the German speaker I'd like to first had the thought for someone the name is not well-known yet David buckel who committed suicide by burning himself in Brooklyn a few days ago out of despair for the way in which we became unseen city so to speak to the what I call the new chromatic regime and he burned himself with oil against the oil interests or speak those of my generation remember young balázs sacrificed and in 1969 in prague who also burn himself out of despair about the complete indifference at the time on against Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia and I'm very moved by the these two characters only one of them is now an icon in the history of a 20th century because they are to justice by absolutely honest person who saw no way to articulate the political position and out of despair in the way we so to speak I mean 1968 generation and now your generation could not support so to speak or articulate in any thoughtful way in which how can we do politics with the new political question and of course Palash was working and using a repertoire of politics we are familiar with we were familiar in the 20th century and the prime was David buckel is but we don't even know how to understand we sacrificed because we have no political register to talk about the fights in which we are engaged but I think this character should be celebrated at the beginning of this I'm going to make free point one of them is to summarize as far as I can this little book which so come kindly published in German this definition of a terrestrial as a possible name for New Horizons of politics then I will discuss one paper by Professor Shannon Berger Shannon you burp on the Copernican revolution and we'll discuss I'm very glad to have this occasion to discuss with him if it's a counter Copernican revolution or anakin revolution and evaluate so to speak the solidity of the notion of Gaia and then I would raise again the question which John mentioned in his 1999 paper which is what progress did we make in the invention of a political subject who can articulate was able to articulate the new political positions and I'll end up very briefly on a sort of political philosophy point the general point which I will make in all these sectors is that one of a cause there are many others but one of the cause of our enough inability to articulate a position has a philosophical root we are unable to understand what we are made of so to speak which is one of a limit of our political position this is what I will try to do ok the first point is a summary or at least one of the argument made in this terrorist regime manifests in France it has in France it adolescent when jewels title it was just where to land but our fine from zircon made it sound more Guangzhou's than I wanted it with so let's be it it's a terrorist Fisher manifest the point I'm making verb in the book is that there is a link between the conservative revolution which is now happening we were in in the planet and the denial of the climate transformation so this is similar abuse in a way and when not articulated in another way what is abuse is that when you are faced every day with the news about the transformation of a planet what do you do with all these news about the ice about the disappearance of the insect about the co2 about the ice sheet about soil disappearance etc and even if you are not interested in that you keep getting these news constantly and it just eats you up in some sort of sense and one of a symptom of this transformation has been a conservative revolution which is often understood as a return or as to use another book by sukham great regression as if we were again witnessing something like in the 1930s and I think that would be a mistake it's a very new conservative revolution so to speak which is registering in the worst possible way but still registering a transformation of the Earth's system and that's the point I want to make because in a way it was made for me by the man whose name I don't want to pronounce but you know him who on the first of June 2017 withdrew from the Paris agreement and of course it's an important diplomatic gestures but I take it as a very important philosophical gesture which is the first time a country one of a country which was part of the West says the way in which nature function in our land is not the way you have nature in your land so to speak so a sort of breach not only of political interest but a breach of the way the link between politics and nature was organized before we know that people have different views about society and politics is not surprising but for the first time someone explicitly said in our government in the United States of America there is no climatic transformation whatsoever and you of the rest of the world can get lost so to speak and that creates for me a transformation that is this is the argument inverse small book it makes a very big shift in the way we understand where the sort of word community or modern view of the world was leading to the if this diagram is just a simplification but basically we agreed that there was a great interest in moving from the local to the global from a small sort of traditional or more archaic caste towards something which would look like the horizon of the globe so to speak a global view was supposed to be better and the the movement forward what I called the modernizing front modernizing frontier was organizing the way we described regression and progression the way we described left and right progressive and reactionary and even the difference between the past and the future so we had this organization and it sort of of was a vector that made easy to differentiate politically where people were standing now the difficulty is that the notion of globalization as itself suffered a complete transformation so nowadays completely to different meaning of the world global and globalization had were associated for many years many decades with a multiplication and amplification of the numbers of way of being associated and to be understanding how the world works so the more globalized beware the world in France we use Monte Ally's as you as well as globalization the more diversity views cultural aspect and attention and attachment you had but now since the last 30 years and in my view largely because what happened to the planetary system what we mean by globalization is exact reverse we mean by globalization provincial extension of a very very very tiny numbers of standard about how to live what it is to be a subject what to be to have law what it is to calculate your interest and so on and so forth which have been spreading all over the planet and eating up at the diversity and multiplicity of life-forms and when I say life-forms I'm not talking only about humans I'm only only also talking about all of the animates with which we collaborate so to speak so when you say I'm against again globalization we never know which one is it is it the one which increased the numbers of diversity the amount of diversity or is it the one that actually decrees it and that creates in my view a sort of disorientation and it is this disorientation that explains the conservative revolution people have heard through the press in the scientific dispatchers who of course the extraordinary increase in inequalities in economic revenues and so on they have understood that what we meant by the horizon of modernization the globe of globalization we attractor to which they were ready to do sacrifice is actually gone you can read people and when you read in even if you don't read it seriously but you see in the Guardian a piece about we have only 50 years of soil left even if you are not interested in ecology eats at you and the solution is of course the one which we are very well aware of which is to say okay let's go back to the local so the conservative revolution is this sensation this feeling that if the globe is actually gone if you're risin of globalization is inaccessible at least let us go back to what we know as protection identity borders walls and so on and I don't need to stress that in Germany but it's true everywhere not only in Europe but of course in England which breaks it as well as in America with the man whose name should not be pronounced but he needs a war so the disorientation my argument is that the disorientation is due to the feeling that there is something wrong in the definition of a very horizon toward which politic was actually aiming at it's it's not a shift on values it's not a shift in sort of political attitude on me it's a shift in the definition of the shape of the world on which politics is supposed to apply itself so to speak so we have a third attractor I have none thing I have a pointer and so we you see it here which is translated wrong there the new sort of attractor which weighs on the definition of those who wanted to go to the global and those who wanted to go back to the old local which I have no name for it I don't want to call it the earth too fast I don't want to call it nature too fast for reason which I'll say in a minute and I call it the terrestrial the terrestrial is a sort of new entity which he's claiming to have attention and we don't know how to do it because we are still in were modernizing vectors so to speak on the the attractor one going to attract or to or backwards and the difficulty of every politics of a climate so to speak every questions around how come that we don't have the articulated efficient politics to deal with the problem is because we don't know how to orient ourselves to this third attractor which I call the terrestrial and it's a difficult one because it requires alliances which are difficult to do it's not a return to the past local even though it has lots of connection with it in France we just had a big event around facade of not Haddam Delon which was we a project of an airport which was finally abandoned and was sad for us is a very important signal of a chance is it was that local because it sort of argued against an airport no because it's also a very worldly Mondial ways of organizing politics and agriculture and imagining alternative ways of doing it so it it doesn't fit into the reactionary progressive definition abandoning an airport it's reactionary no because it's not return to the task it's doing something else so every single question in political ecology has turned around this question of not fitting into the traditional one two vectors but in modifying how we define the new horizons of politics and the difficulty is how to understand this terraced roads over to other parts of my talk are devoted to this this is there was a very interesting show in Paris by Anna stone of architect a stone of architecture around the difficulty of making spheres and globes in architecture is a whole history of that since the Roman time and this is the cover of the book that we choose with Jochum so the globe is always we have always been illusion that if we were thinking globally ecologically we would put things in a globe but of course what happens is that it's not a globe what we are putting things in is actually something else which is a flat dimension in which we have to learn so what I want to sort of visualize to you in the second part is the difference between the sphere the globe and the terrestrial so to speak now what is an eye of course studied that quite a claims in another book which has an ever grandiose title or come from Gaia but that when you are translated in Germany it's always sort of amplify your seriousness which is a paper by John Shannon Huber which is a very interesting paper which I reread recently for this lecture it just almost just twenty years ago it's about the counter Copernican River it's about the second Copernican revolution and it argues about transformation as important now with what is equals earth systems science as the first Copernican revolution which was associated with Galileo and Kepler and V others but what I want to understand is what exactly means is this Copernican revolution if we take seriously the metaphor that John used in his paper and I think there is a difference between the earth and the globe the terrestrial is not exactly the globe and that's it's a prime of visualizing the terrain on which politic is exerting itself I know that the great idea about a global view of ecology called view and even Earth System science is to reuse the metaphor and the visual of the earth seen from the space station and hear about the Apollo thing and there was actually in this very building a few years ago a very beautiful exhibition on the history of the Old Earth Catalog and of the image of the blue planet but what happened is exactly the opposite actually far from uniting the global view is actually now we know a source of constant divide and polemics and controversy and even we know Wars so the the planetary view is not what by sort of extraordinary influence of a beauty of a blue planet we'll say well we are all of the same planet thus we agree nature does not unite nature divided and everyday and not even if we think about America withdrawing from the agreement of times but every single detail about everything from the call in Germany to the fish to be food to everything is actually a topic of political controversy so the blue planet is not the unifying element view planet is actually the source of most division and visit why I want to shift the attention out of the notion of globe to the notion of surfaces with actually talking and Benna I mentioned it in its introduction about critical zone about something which is a filmer a surface something which is compared to the notion of a terrestrial globe almost invisibly small and it's very strange if you think of it is but when we imagine the globe if we take for globe seriously almost everything we are aware of everything we care for disappears from view because it's so small so there is actually in the notion of globe a very perverted way of understanding our own human and life position yeah and we are to reason for that which is summarizing this small diagram one of them is that the critical zone that is the thin surface on which everything of the interest for the question of new Kemetic regime is taking place is small but it's also epistemologically disputed none of the people I've met in verse study of climate science and a critical zone well in geology were in agriculture in soil sciences in hydrology etc whatever paper they produce in good scientific journal it will be disputed by other interest I mean there is something which is sort of structural in the way those Sciences are developing on the critical zone which are not the case if you study the rest of universe or if you study the deep plate tectonics of the center of the geophysics of Earth whatever you say Vandana I just learned that PP write a paper about the part per million of co2 is now full 10 I guess for 110 if you write a paper on that in the best scientific journal you will be immediately accused by some other interest of wanting to destroy the state of the economy of the United States so if every state of fact being published in this domain which is the critical zone science will be in the middle of a controversy and there is no better example than the book by Michael Mann I don't know if you can read it but the subtitle is dispatches from the frontlines he's the man who you know the one who was engaged into the dispute about the hockey curve and it's a typical case it's it is what it is actually a war with a frontline and it is impossible to make this discussion more sort of safe and say well I'm just doing science and I'm not doing politics it's impossible there so the question of e of a fin of a studying the finished surface is actually epistemologically fraught with difficulty on poly mix and also it's not concerned with rest of e not necessary concerned with the rest of universe and that's why I would prefer counter Copernican revolution it's back to a highly specific question raised about the earth the thin biofilm of the earth which have to be engaged in a relation between scientists and politics and city which is unusual for the rest of the science of the universe and for me this is what I learned largely from the I would call it love Lockean margaret is Gaia hypothesis I know it's always difficult to talk about Gaia in among anywhere because people associate Gaia was a sort of lots of strands things but for me Ganga is actually something and we'll discuss of course with John in a minute which is the association of two different point one by lynn margulis and we ever by james lovelock we would took the question i'm raising of what is the earth made off the critical zone made off from two completely different view Lovelock taking it from the top and margulies from the elements but what you have to understand is that guy is nothing to do with the earth being alive or balance of nature or all of these things i mean it's actually a we composition of what the agent of the world a small word film by orphen world are made of and my argument is that our political importance is largely due to the philosophical difficulty we have in understanding what sort of agent we are you cannot ask for a political agent to take seriously the climate transformation without asking the question of who are the agent what it is to have agency and what is really interesting in these two characters is that they blurred the distinction between biotic and abiotic element at two different levels this is a pictures of of Lovelock which i took probably it will be slightly irritating for for john because it's the example of Lovelock a bit as a maverick making fun of the other scientist isn't its own laboratory as everything in its own little cell and is obviously a contrarian scientist but what interested me is that it modifies and this is a famous piece of evidence which is now almost seven five years old but which is still very important to understand a very simple piece of evidence but very dramatic and which in my view is entirely justified the argument about the Copernican revolution which is if you look on the sorry left side the earth side balance of chemical in the atmosphere there is none of this is possible on the if a planet had no life that you have on the right side it's a very simple is one of the original paper from love log in 65 which is a very simple argument is that nothing what happened in this room in terms of the chemical atmosphere is understandable without life having produced it produced it so the life is not in an environment life is producing its own environment and life is what has actually made this environment possible now this argument in a way was known it was known from the Netsky that it has been going on for a long time what is really interesting is in the connection with margulies argument and by the way there is a new film in which this is a bit of a publicity for the film about Margaret and Magnus was also a maverick scientist inbounder ji and now she has moved much more to the center with this discovery and this world is now very famous the word of a hollow bones we are all hollow bones I mean wow now no one would say I'm a body I have a body you'd say I have my body so many so many cells plus all of my microbes and we evolve together happily which is very funny actually we now are very pleased to be multitude we are multitude not infer delusions and we are multitude in terms of microbes it's me and microbes we evolved which is one other thing and so there's a to what is absolutely crucial about guys to understand that these two revolution in conceptual revolution are of course the same one there is no distinction between biotic and abiotic things on earth and the unit itself is not a unit of herself the unit is actually an holo biome that is an assembly of element which have taken and kidnap one another and are also let's say as is a topic of the title of a new French of book overlapping linked together in strange ways folded into one another and this is summarized beautifully in a paper by Scott Gilbert in I like the title because it takes up from one of my title we have never been individual so you have never been individual is not just we all right it's you we report here that the zoological Sciences are also finding that animals are composite of many species living developing and evolving together the discovery of symbiosis throughout the animal kingdom is fundamentally transforming the classical conception of an insula individuality into one into which interactive relationship among species blurs the boundaries of the organism and obscures the notion of essential identity this is the point I want to make if we want to have a political philosophy adjusted to the climate transformation it's of course the definition of a subject of what it is to have agency which is has to be modified and it's precisely the this double modification which is for me in the connection between Margaret's and Lovelock it's very funny because I don't know if it's a German new trend but you seem to be producing lots of those books now about trees having all sort of communication microbes in my intestine being very interesting and having lots of thing to say about yourself Julia Anders was I think she saw the million copies book right I mean it's an amazing success well we now have a French book at Toussaint ha let's see I mean there are hundreds of these books which which are modifying the way we define myself and I think this is a very important aspect of the political transformation of II I don't know the German part of a Gutzon trees so the end of his second part is is it with this very important paper by Tim Linton Jim Linton was one of a best student of love locking away indirectly which is it might be slightly difficult to interpret but it just to summarize the to point about Margaret's undeveloped life forms have extended in space this is vertical and in time this is horizontal and at each of his successes so to speak there is a different mechanism allowing for the feedback of those life forms and of course you cannot expect the feedback mechanism the coupling in cybernetic term to be the same and to be as accurate for things like I don't know the control of internal temperature of a body and for the climate which is a very weakly weakly weak coupling and also as climate scientists sadly knows a very fragile one so what they this pictures summarize is the possibilities that when we talk about the Gaia hypothesis or earth system science we are talking about level of control and level of processes of the life-forms which have made their own environment completely different there is no unity of Gaia and that's the great advantage compared to the notion of nature nature implied a unity of the mechanism at work and it was very difficult after that to make the link with society diversity of cultures and so on and so forth which now we are looking for something which is precisely extended to the former nature and to the formula cultural the same sort of repertoire and that's essential for political philosophies and that would be the third point the emergence of a new political subject in its original paper in 1999 actually John mentioned is a mathematician and a formalist so the subject of political philosophy were one with at great pain in reading I don't know Aristotle is also also is replaced by s with a capital S in the equation here and I want to interview John in a minute to understand what he meant by this s and how he follows it s is supposed to be the subject able to take over the reflexive dimension that the word Anthropocene is summarizing he's very subject able to be the subject of a climate transformation we are now doing to the earth and the earth is reacting back to our action there is a cycle but there is no subject and of course this question was raised and I was absolutely astonished to see that in his paper he actually mentioned hops and very Viton which I use as very important part of a book on Gaia which is twice the same question one in the 17th century what it is to have a subject what it is to have a political entity very vital what it is to have order in this society and in nature and now we are raised exactly - sorry we are asked to raise exactly the same political question not only political science but also natural science whatever subject what is nature what sort of entity we are supposed to have a subject but if you see this is the paper in nature which was summarizing the entrepreneur's cushon a few years back and this is the image and you see the guy is completely blind so this is John Shannon Huber subject it's a blind monster like the Leviathan which has absolutely no idea what happened to it but which is running to the catastrophe blindfolded just knowing what to do with it okay so that's where we are inventing a subject and inventing in a multiplicity of discipline exactly the same forum as the one which was taken by hops in the 17th century with the strap problem of a return of the question of anthropomorphism she's a very strange question coming back is the subject of the new politics of climate similar resembling the subject of politics in the Hobbesian sense in the 17th century can we recognize it as a subject there's a very strong quote by Lovelock I mean people who like Lovelock never like this political position usually and I'm the same as everybody else but this one is really interesting the Gaia hypothesis implies that the stable state of our planet which would call sustainability in a way include man as part of partner in a very democratic entity what could it mean to say that the entities which compose the critical zone of terrestrial are democratic well there is one sense only in which it has a meaning and it's not to be found in political philosophies I think really right now and this is I'm glad to say that in this place here in house Deaf culture in the world because I think it's one of the important agenda of a place what we did with the ultra pro scene is that it's to be found in the arts and today I've just finished the book last week the most advance we understanding of what is the subject in the new climatic regime is this book by Richard powers the other story which is about trees and people fighting and militant burning themselves actually this is why I make the link at the origin with David buckel and burn an attack for the defense of trees and of course it's a magnificent another but it's also a very important exploration of a new connection between trees and people which does not anthropomorphize the trees in any sort of sense but builds the new relation between trees and people which give them the political maturity of a political articulation which I'm looking for in in this inquiry which is you could say well what is missing is a subject of authority and many people who have work in ecology sort of appealing to a sure let's have a dictator of representing the tenets of something I mean let's have something which is as strong as a strong power as possible but we know now where the people go who aspire to a strong power they go to the conservative revolution path and back to the nation-state so it's very difficult to imagine a dictator of a universal interest so it the paradox is that went and what just when we need a subject to take over the role of a political character it's the very definition of what is an ant reported and this is very well articulated by clive hamilton in a very strange book called defiant earth I don't know if it's in German where which is an argument about look everybody is now discussing the entrepot centrism everybody wants other definition of the anthropos people are criticizing the very word and to piscine because it brings the entrepreneur I'm having turn and just warning you know it's just a time when you need precisely a human form back and this is a quote future of your entire planet including many forms of life is now contingent on the decision of a conscious force the S of a paper by John many years ago even if a sign of it acting in concert are only embryonic and may still been may be stillborn I think we agree on that in the face of his brood fact denying the uniqueness and power of human becomes perverse so this is where we are in a quandary which is do we modify the definition of what it is to be a human agent just at the time when a human agent powerful and in command is requested or what do we do and of course the contradiction is between the work of people like Clive Hamilton and many of my friends wife is also a good friend of mine by the way like and that sing in this beautiful book the mushroom mushroom at the end of the world it's amazing anthropology called book by cohn about trees hair away of course staying with the trouble wait three of them are wait critique of the word and Rupa scene precisely because it brings the entrepreneurs but they want to redistribute the human in very original and disputed way so this is where we we are going to conclude what was really stunning in the piece by John in 1999 was to to phrase a frame the question of Earth System science as a Copernican revolution but I think you see that I prefer to call it a counter a Copernican revolution but is not going from me the earth in the center to the Sun at the center but undergone way back to the earth except it's a very very different earth it's just a critical zone it's actually made of agent which have very specific properties which are no longer object sitting side by side and which have of course the discovery which is new we'd never had to take that into account before that their action is actually having the environment reacts on themselves and this is what in a way the parallel the striking parallel between the two revolution is that it's much more difficult to live in our paradigm shift so to speak because when we were talking about the first Copernican revolution it wasn't a change in our interpretation of the world of the way of the world work but it didn't change the world itself its the way we understood it and now what we are talking about is actually a parametric transformation that if we don't do anything the word in which we are not the universe critical zone will itself be transformed and modified so in a way of the stakes are much higher and I I want to make some publicity for means it's a bit late Felicity it's a fin for it's a absolutely I mean I'm sure in German you have many films about Galilee was life of Galileo by brushed but I recommend this one by looser and looser was the one who actually represented the first instance of the life of Galileo in in Los Angeles in 1945 and it's it's what is beautiful in the in the play is that there is a clear connection between if you change the order of a planet if you go from Earth Center to Center you modify the whole political order so now we understand that very well for now and that's why so many people say there is no transformation of a climate nothing is modifying because we know that if you modify anything about the order of the world you modify the order of society completely so there is a clear parallel between what happened at the time of Galileo and what happened now in terms of a cosmology but of course as it's shown in many of the paper by John and others is that the situation is much worse because it's not just if we interpret badly the Copernican revolution you would have difficulty in your calculation about the planet but the rest of a phenomena will remain exactly the same no matter if the Sun turn around of your turn around and he had if we don't find the right interpretation and the right connection between the order of the world and the order of society we change the world will get into like inverse dramatic drawings into a state of inability in Abbott ability out of which we will might first recover well I wish I would have said something more positive at the end but it's not the sort of topic where you can end very positively I started with David Berg death and as and that Singh said we have to learn how to live in ruin which is I think a very important way but I'm very happy to be here and very happy to be able to discuss with John on some of the topic I mentioned today thank you very much [Applause] you

Channel: HKW Anthropocene

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Keywords: anthropocene, lecture

Id: UtaEJo-jo8Q

Length: 43min 20sec (2600 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 18 2018