Bruno Latour - Gaia 2.0/Down to Earth

you will know I'm not a natural scientist because I will read because I'm not sure slice a list of problems to be addressed to cope with me in hound instability of Gaia some people will certainly see and have a proof Gaia hypothesis made 15 years ago by James Lovelock is not a well-established scientific discovery in the very fact that someone like me without any of the right scientific credential has been asked to speak at the start of our meeting and yet if Tim Linton has asked so many different people from so many different discipline to participate in very centenary celebration about Gaia it because there is I believe an inherent instability in Gaia and this is why it might not be completely odd to have someone from the social sciences and the humanities talk to you in both humanity as you know we are very good at ambiguities unstability unsettled and when there is not enough of it we add so there is clearly an instability in Gaia are taken as a phenomenon first because Gaia is a historical entity with a constantly moving set of event and it has each Teresa T as we say in our jargon and second because the discussions about Gaia have emerged in a much disputed epoch of the Anthropocene another kind of world I'm not going to talk about whenever Gaia the phenomenon is brought in it immediately related to long term history and short emergency mentioning Gaia I'm sure you have experience is always raising an alarm and a double source of instability but there is also an inherent instability in guy as a concept many of us here have written which is very amusing books about Gaia but if we are spending two weeks together secluded in this room to finally a definitive undisputable and share definition of what we mean by Gaia it's very clear to me that we will not be able to do so and I'm wrong on that we will see I remember the video was at the end of a London Science Museum about love love it was an exhibition a few years ago each of the videos had a completely different and contradictory message about what Gaia was and meant in Sebastian Dutra extensive historical reconstruction of Gaia discovery and reception they are about five different threads fairy hypothesis philosophy of science worldview research program in order to follow the way Gaia a spread or has been interrupted so many of you I'm sure faced with shut so confusion have resorted to what I call a strategy of selection and sorting I've done it a lot myself so you say well my guy is the Gaia of love locks first book we just heard it not what happened after that or Gaia is really one other name for Earth System science or forget about the mythological name this what I call a poisonous gift given by Golding and use it an acronym I tried vertical g AI a geophysical agent integrated analyzes I'm sure it would have been much better for Ghana or Gaia is a strictly scientific notion okay we tried everything to circumvent what we like in Gaia and rejected the rest but the rest keeps popping up nonetheless we have to accept that no concept invented during the Holocene is immediately usable to describe a non troppo seen concept if a strategy of selection and sorting has failed it's because I propose to say that the instability of a concept of a phenomenon is built in Gaia is historically a schooi generous entity suing an aries as a phenomenon of course it has made itself in the course of Earth history and suing an Aries in its discovery in the course of the last half century it's a new entity which has in fact no real predecessor as Isabel Stan gasps one of the first philosopher to take up a challenge of facing Gaia seriously said Gaea is an intruder it comes crashing in it cannot be tamed it's an intrusion this is why I found myself at Liberty when I began to inquire about love locks work to develop the parallel with Galileo and the Scientific Revolution the Galileo moment and the controversy that it triggers is the best template to understand how come artists astronomers theologian politicians engineer industrialists and citizen were taken for the same frenzy by the discovery of a moving earth at the time and now again another moving up another frenzy but this time the moving of is for good and another cosmological rearrangement of I think similar magnitude and I don't think my parallel is in any way contrived even though I dramatize a little bit if you compare to the dramatic effect of the intrusion of Gaia you cannot never dramatize enough a situation because of its powers of intrusion I think we should accept that Gaia has a capacity of gathering and attracting different and contradictory people and discipline which is inversely proportionate with its powers of convincing the establishment so to speak at least with its ability to be integrated in the Canon of science it's very interesting it gathers a lot of people but it's not actually we had an example responding which was quite interesting last Friday the celebration of Jim Lovelock's 100th birthday was a good exterior illustration of its inverse relation 200 people were attending moved and their life and scientific worldview transformed but none of those speeches mentioned this of that technical aspect of Gaia as their main source of interest or emotion this doesn't mean people talked about psychology or spirituality no but they integrated the technical aspects into something else and with something as intruded into their life and that is still puzzling them and having burgeoning all of us here I guess there's a certain powers of attraction and conversion that changes everything without people exactly able to dig Cryer what it is so the in account instability of Gaia as a phenomenon and Gaia as a concept is replicated and vastly expanded by the instability of a reception of Gaia by each of the members of issue Johnson the public at large I certainly think the same I don't think facing Gaia you can face Gaia and get out of it mu nothing very something which is too strong here that's what intruders do the crashing they terrify the direct attention and attract everything in their wake and we are the one who try to cope with this triple source of uncertainty is this a unless description or the audience today or honor if I'm right when the best way to handle the invitation of the Exeter team which has set up this digital experiment I hope you know we are part of a little experiment for mcgraw Buddhism is not to continue the first strategy my Gaia is the right thing and your Gaia really stinks but to embrace the second one by accepting the triple instability and answering the following question question one why is it that the intrusion of Gaia Crashers for so many questions at once in so many domains question two can we make the list of the most obvious site in which the Gaia attracted distorts everything and once the list is made and question free can we domesticate the intruder in a way that it's less traumatic and that of course what Tim Linton did by using the word the expression 2.0 as if a crime was solved as if we knew anything about Gaia 1.0 and but that's a clever move it says well for Primus so now you guys you solve it so in a few remaining minutes I want to start the list and obvious - and you would add first the Gaia hypothesis is the greatest way to debunk and criticize the notion of global scale I think something which is not understood well enough and this because it's simultaneously concerned by disturbing the true extreme point of the biggest and other smallest this is how I came to love Locke from Action Network theory he was a way to generate the biggest atmosphere acidity of the ocean etc temperature for the smallest agency mainly bacteria of most of long-term history of you that's where the connection between margaret's and Lovelock is so essential and so radical both have contested scales and built a completely different path to generate differences of scale without the Russian doll model used usually in model building and especially of course in social science for Gaia is even more Network e than the extremely confusing notion of society I've criticized for many years a key figure for Gaia 2.0 because we need to know in which sort of collective we are going to be there is one Gaia that Gaia is not one as we saw from a beautiful slide of but with that team presented a minute ago Gaia the second point Gaia is come crashing in boundary and to an extraordinary degree from the beginning even for biologists especially Darwinist at first behave as if their notion of biology could be sort of adjusted to the novelty of Gaia it's not the case it's a nice case actually of trying to put all new wine into old skin margaret's at the cell level and Lovelock at the planetary level are requesting a redefinition of what life means and what the self mean this is why the earth is alive laughter he's very misleading as long as we don't define what we define what allies mean and others are much better place than me to develop this item of list but it's really a very key question of for our understanding of to Gala 2.0 because it's a at the heart of a notion of the agency the third item in my list is intentionality our goal function the point where Tim just mentioned and of course it's a kind of world the most provoking element in Lovelock faeces has been for proposition as you know that life as a goal in the sand that it works to protect it's all continuing a bit a bit ability and keep it maintaining him against perturbation of the eons of time because the provocation was badly understood at first because scientists of a galilean mode believe that mechanistic explanation requires no goal function at all and we had forgotten that mechanistic philosophy had been invented earlier by theologian to describe our God rules the word and made it that is as an engineer so if you drop God and you transformed it into a blind watchmaker it's blind for sure but it's still a maker and the point that is never understood in Lovelock is that it's because is not mechanistic that it's less providentially oriented another theory it's because he's not mechanistic but it's less probably insurance it's sort of a misunderstanding with the batteries and including of course which whenever Darwinian account of evolution for fully providential agency of natural selection sorry to say that in England I know you should never criticize down Gaia is a secular entity it's another parallel with Galileo which interests me a lot it's an avid definition of secure this is a key question for Gaia 2.0 because it's not the case but the advent of the Anthropocene human consciousness will finally take over the task of directing evolution which is why criticize the brain that Tim showed and back children if a brain arrived and various direction this would be an extraordinary arrogant ID evolution has always directed itself that's what suga Narus means and the situation is not that smart human are ruling finally over dead stuff but that smart agents including bacteria are deeply / - abated by dumb human he again all the question of intention goal value prediction are thrown into a pot holocene trained human are on average extraordinary ill-prepared to be able to master anything especially a planet this is the famous quote I love talk about the goat but you would never imagine humans to be a good mastering the planet normal and goat will be a good gardener I forgot exactly this leads of course to the next big question on my list namely that of Gaia as a new form of body politic the reason I'm so interested in the ability of a concept of Gaia to attract so many different people we studied at the front views without really integrating them into a unanimous hole of any soul is that this is exactly what we expect from a new form of polity have largely developed with argument in facing Gaia and I build palin between Diane Hobbes Leviathan but Gaia is clearly not nature as it was conceived in earlier time it's much more explicitly political than with ancient counterpart of politics in terms of legal reasoning because there is a legal dimension in Gaia it has a totally original sort of presence not to say authority when dozen Gaia weighs on us in some sort of sense sovereignty maybe want to but of course many people and all of us who have been trained into another geopolitical Jewish storycorps epoch of difficulty registering with the parallel with ancient civilization or contemporary non industrial society of course has a lot of Appeal at repeated remains superficial because no collective no acne of any sort no nation-state had to absorb something like the intrusion of gaya in Vienna regime in the foreseeable future we will live inside a new political entity it has no institutional Constitution of any sort and that's another source of instability well valise could go on but into a few minutes left ICF to let me try two of them and one might not be so important for his audience except one or two of them which i think is crucial which is how gaya came crashing into religion especially Christian religion it's Christianity that has constantly preached for apocalyptic dimension and appeal to the Novus Ordo seclorum the new earth the constant theme of Christianity I'm now not simply speaking of a typically English obsession with natural religion but with a more basic question having to do with our earthly condition in dogmatic term it means something like this what is the meaning of the Incarnation and the whole Christian dispensation if a respective attraction of up the heaven and the down earth is subversive some of you may know the gospel saying what does it mean to gain the whole world if you lose your soul it's a famous quote from gospel but what is Venu saying in the Anthropocene if it were reasoning like this what does it mean to gain your soul if you lose your earth and ayuh 2.0 for lots of reason needs the power of religious soul they are the energy but it's a major shift for them to set their site on earth and heaven here again transcendence stinks and for the second time is quite so important since the Scientific Revolution Christian religion has to react to a new definition of security in what it is to be absorbed secularity of 3 generis sueing Canaries I promise this is the last item another key element is what Gaia does to the odds as a host of made clear in their program art is part and parcel of a meeting and we are right for recent directly related to Gaius ambiguity a pleasant reader of my book down to earth proposed to say that it requires not a lot of soul-searching but a lot of soil of searching and that's exactly the point we have to tackle when confronting Gaius requests a whole civilization let's call him industrial capitalism doesn't matter lifts itself in a place of no place literally a utopia and suddenly realize it has to land somewhere without crashing and with sudden search for land to inhabit durably what we mean by the domestication of Gaia Gaia 2.0 requires a whole set of new forms of emotion and Sensibility but his the ability to sense and to respond what is called aesthetics and it's the topic we will discuss of course a lot in a lot of session here well I've said enough to show that the intrusion of Gaia leaves nothing intact but we are in a way fortunate to have to face such an intrusion and that it's a great honor for all of us and for me to have been invited by the Exeter team to test our luck in responding to Gaius thank you very much [Applause] you

Channel: University of Exeter

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Keywords: University of exeter, exeter uni, exeter university, student life, undergraduate, postgraduate, degree, studying, university life, bruno latour, Lovelock Centenary, Gaia, GSI, Global Systems Institute

Id: Fmonvx9dV_E

Length: 20min 11sec (1211 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 12 2019