[MUSIC PLAYING] - Good afternoon, everyone. I'm Liz Cohen. I'm Dean here at the Radcliffe
Institute for Advanced Study, and I am delighted to welcome
you all this afternoon to a lecture by renowned
philosopher and anthropologist, Bruno Latour. At Radcliffe, we are dedicated
to inquiry and investigation that transcends
disciplinary boundaries, tackles important issues, and
shares advance work widely. We support innovative research
through our fellowship program, our conferences, world class
collections at the Schlesinger Library, and more. We take particular pleasure
in co-sponsoring this event with the Mahindra
Humanities Center, our partner in encouraging
boundary-crossing work. And I'm glad to see so
many friends and colleagues from across and beyond
the university with us this evening. A leading UK publication in
the field of higher education recently found that Bruno Latour
was the 10th most cited author in journal literature, racking
up more references than Karl Marx or Martin Heidegger. Even more impressive than
the raw number of citations is the range of disciplines
where scholars have cited him. The influence of
Latour's work is felt across fields
as wide-ranging as technology, the
history of science, politics, and art history. Let me give you some examples. Latour's studies of Louie
Pasteur and laboratories have deepened our insight
into how science is practiced, examining not just the data
of scientific knowledge, but the social processes by
which that data is understood by both scientists
and laypeople. Latour is the key founder of
actor network theory, which argues that in order to
understand our larger systems, whether a city, or a
nation, or a planet, we must examine
the relationships between multiple entities. We must understand
the interactions between different
people to be sure, but we must also understand
how people, plants, animals, objects, and places
influence each other. Actor network theory
has left its mark on fields ranging from ancient
history to public health. When applied to a field
like urban planning, actor network theory
takes the structures that shape human
interaction and thinking and makes them visible. Latour's illuminating
multimedia essay, "Paris the Invisible City"
inspects the city with just such a lens, zooming down
to the level of street signs and traffic lights to
uncover, as Latour puts it, the Parises within Paris. Latour invites us to examine
our assumptions and frameworks with rigor. He questions what it
means to be modern and complicates the way
we categorize objects. Today, Latour will
speak to us on a topic both urgent and colossal, how
do we make sense of ourselves and our planet in an age
of rapid climate change? President Obama calls planet
warming terrifying, not just for what it means for
ocean acidity, ice caps, and ecosystems,
but for, as he puts it, and I quote him, "the strains
on cultures, on civilizations, on nations." And that is why we
need Bruno Latour. We have heard over and over
about what climate change might mean for our national security
or our foreign policy, but we do not stop to think
often enough about its impact on culture and society. We live in an age many have
called the Anthropocene, meaning an era in
which humanity has shaped the planet on
an unprecedented scale. How can we square our previous
notions of human agency with the current reality
and probable future in which human inflicted
damage to the planet overwhelms human
capacity to solve the problems we have created? How will our previous ideas
about nature, religion, and science hold up? And how must we reassess them? Those are exactly the
types of questions that Bruno Latour can help
us ask and begin to answer. His new work, which we
will discuss tonight, wrestles with
these timely issues across the disciplines of
anthropology, science, history, and political theory. Because Latour's
writings have always sparked so many
important conversations, we wanted to be sure that
this event tonight captured that critical back and
forth of scholarly exchange. We have thus assembled an
impressive set of scholars to discuss these
and other questions today after Latour speaks. And we are delighted to
have Homi Bhabha here to moderate that discussion. Homi is the Anne F. Rothenberg
Professor of the Humanities and director of the Mahindra
Humanities Center at Harvard. He is the author of The
Location of Culture, an editor of the
Nation and Narration, among many other works. He is a distinguished
and probing voice to lead a conversation about
sovereignty, globalization, climate change, and
other global developments with pressing significance. Here's how this
evening will work. After Bruno Latour
delivers his lecture, he will join Homi along
with our Harvard colleagues, Peter Galison and Diane Davis
on stage for a discussion. Peter is the Joseph Pelligrino
University Professor of Physics and director
of the Collection of Historical Scientific
Instruments at Harvard. Diane is the Charles Dyer Norton
Professor of Regional Planning and Urbanism and chair of the
Department of Urban Planning and Design at the Harvard
Graduate School of Design. So I'm very grateful to
Homi, Peter, and Diane for joining us here today. So now, I ask you to
join me in welcoming Bruno Latour to the stage. [APPLAUSE] - Thank you very much for
the nice introduction. Thank you very much for
the citation by Obama. It's always nice to me. And also, in spite of
what Obama says, yesterday in the debate between
Clinton and Trump, not once a good question
was about the climate. Clinton made just a very
brief allusion to the problem. So this is why I wanted to start
with this image I took when coming here for
the plane, which is a quite extraordinary
icepack screen in a sort of quasi Muench-like way
coming from the plane to remind you of what I'm
going to talk to you today, which is not very nice. But as the dean said,
it's a way of trying to re-articulate
many of the questions inside the culture, which
is certainly impacted by this big new problem for
which it's true that we are not terribly well prepared. And Homi proposed as a title to
have all of these dotted lines, because what I want to do is
to distinguish as much as I can both different concepts. You need to know how I am
approaching this question. I'm coming from three
different angles, because I think
three are necessary. One of them is speculative. This is a series of lectures
I gave at the Gifford Lectures in Edinburgh a few years ago,
which is soon in English, which is basically a study
according to Gifford's principle in natural religion. And I thought it
was a good topic to try to see what Gaia means. I mention that in a minute. Then there is also, since I'm
an historian and sociologists of science, an empirical study. I'm studying a set of
scientists in basically what could be
called geomorphology or geobiomorphology, which I
will talk about in a minute. But also, even though I would
have less time for that, trying to use art as a way to gain
some sort of sensitivity to the question given that
one other thing we lack to understand the
politics of the climate is also the equipment, the
sort of sensitivity equipment, which only art can provide. So one word on the
empirical part before I get to the more complicated
section of his lecture. I'm studying people who
are calling themselves critical zone
observatory network. It's a set of people, NSF
is financing some of them in the US, and there are
many in China and in Europe, who are trying basically to
equip watersheds most often with as much
equipment as possible to make sure that we
begin to understand what the critical zone is for them. It is the top of the canopy
to the deep rock behind, which is basically all of
life form and to try to gain some sort of precise
knowledge, which in fact, we discovered, and I
discovered studying them. We don't have about
complex reaction of weathering the soil, the
transformation of the soil, and all of the
other entities which are summarized very nicely
in this beautiful drawing by Paul Duvingeaud. And what I'm interested
in is especially to try to understand how these
different groups of scientists spread around the world build
what you could call feedback loops to make us the
science first, but then also the general public
around this watershed sensitive to the
effect of the action on the space in which we are. In fact, we realize, and I
realize [INAUDIBLE] scientists. But it's extremely
difficult to be sensitive to what
happened to the land, and to the territory,
and the soil we inhabit. So this is a nice example. This is one of the
observatories [INAUDIBLE] in the top of a
mountain in California. And there is almost
no connection strangely enough between
the observatory, which is on the top of the mountain. It is green and somewhat
wet, not this year, but it used to be wet. And then you have a
Central Valley completely flat, completely polluted,
a completely different environment where you have a
main agrobusiness of the United States, as you know. But the connection between the
two, the input in the Sierra and the output in the
water is so deficient that actually people pump their
fields out against one another until there would
be no water left, at least if a drought goes on. So I'm interested in a
way a group of scientists are trying to build
the instrumentation to render sensitive the
presence and the lack of water in the top with what the
scientists, and engineers, and agrobusinesses
do in the bottom. As you see in the bottom
left, bottom right, sorry, these are some of
the immense pumps, which actually have no meters,
which is an interesting case. There is no meter in California. So you can use as much
water as you wish. So the building of those
loops if you imagine the whole ignorance in which
we are about the reaction not only of the
Earth in general, but every one of
these set ups, is as if we had to build
some haptic device to render sensitive
to our action, which is of course the whole problem
of ecological in general. Now, what is interesting is that
the critical zone observatory can take a slightly
larger meaning. To mean and hear the
word critical in the sort of technical sense means
the fragile and far from equilibrium very
thin layers inside which everything in life exists. This is a quote
by Tim Lenton, one of the student of Jim Lovelock. "For many Earth
systems scientists, the planet Earth
is really comprised of two systems, the
surface system that supports life and the great bulk
of the inner Earth underneath. It is a thin layer of the system
at the surface of the Earth, and it's remarkable
property that is the subject of my work"
and the work of the Earth scientist. Now, this is quite
interesting to try to imagine how these thin layers exist. And I'm being
completely obsessed by the difference between the
vision we have of the group and the vision we have of
this thin layer when we follow the work of these
geoscientists and what those I call, somewhat
affectionately, critical zoneists. And this is actually
fairly difficult. This is why it's always
interesting to relate also to the artist, and this
is part of a project that I have with
geoscientist and artist to try to represent, to give a
feeling for what it is to think of the Earth as thin layers. They sometimes talk about the
skin given some of the varnish, not the whole
nature, but something which is much smaller, much
more fragile, and much thinner. And here the artist,
Alexandra Arenes tried to use cadmium
layers of trees were trying to imagine
what it could be. But it's, of course,
very difficult to think of these thin layers
in any sensible way. I cannot resist showing you
this little work of art by Sarah Sze, which I've seen
a week ago in New. York. It was an amazing piece
where there is precisely no clear geometry,
but you are still surrounded by the
multiplicity of entity which she has assembled to describe
as complex and difficult a way what it is to be in
this critical zone. But sorry, this
is my own camera. I'm trying to get a peek at this
work, which is not yet shown. And I propose to code it
since the work is still entitled critical
zone, because it's too beautiful to be not used. OK, so the reason why this
work by the geoscientists seemed to me so
interesting is because it reopened a sort of
critical leverage against the notion of a globe. The global is actually
something we immediately associate with the
ecological question, and it's killing us,
basically, because every time you have a global, and you have
to absorb the idea that it's a global phenomenon,
and people make these big gestures
with their hand, yes, OK, but that's the
size of a pumpkin, right? I mean it's not much bigger. And in fact, we are
always lost in this globe, and we don't know
how to handle it. So there's a very
clear sense in which we need to feel
something else and have another imagination or another
mythological imagination, and also scientific, to
try to capture something which has been criticized
so excellently by Peter Sloterdijk. Of course, in the Whole Earth
Catalog, which is now many, many years ago, we were
supposed to be all unified by this notion of a
blue planet, right? The image of a blue planet. Every book about ecology
says since the blue planet, we know we are in the same
place, and we are all united. And politics is now a
sort of unanimous activity as we all know. And it has been a
complete failure. The more we get into
ecological questions, the more dispute and
strife increases. So the idea that we
are united by the globe is actually a misreading
of the blue planet. And of course, the image
is also a misreading of the blue planet conceived
as a critical zone, because it sees far apart
and from the outside, and we are inside the layers,
and we see it laterally, so to speak. So there is nothing
more wrong, in a way, than the image of a blue planet. And it's also associated, as
Peter Sloterdijk has shown in the second volume of his
work on the globe, [INAUDIBLE], sorry, that's the
second tome, me is called Globe with
too many globes. There is the Roman Empire. There are large numbers of
religious images associating the [INAUDIBLE] with the
power and the domination of a Christian God. And of course, there
are many other types of globes which are
layered on top of this one. So whenever we have
the globe as a sort of very powerful metaphor, we
are sort of squashed, as Atlas and literally
flattened by the weight of this huge globe, which
is supposed to be taken out. Even with the notion
of Anthropocene the dean mentioned,
that's precisely from the agent of
history able to live at the time of the Anthropocene
does not really exist. It's not a [INAUDIBLE],
all of little human that were here in this
room and 8 billion others. So there is a real problem
of, how could I say, imaginary metaphysic,
if you want, how to describe
agency at the time so that the globe doesn't
crush us, so to speak. And there's another
question with global, which I find extremely
disturbing is that globalization-- the
word global in globalization means to entirely
different elements. One of them is,
of course, a sort of very classic, very
traditional, and in a way, quite beautiful cartographic
principle, which registers with a very simple
principle of longitude and latitude, as
many differences as possible, as the whole of
geography has been able to do. It's map differences. And the more differences
are multiplied even because they are registered
with a very simple idiom. But globalization also means
exactly the opposite, which is the extension of the very
tiny provincial small numbers of settled cliches, so to speak,
extended to the whole planet. So you never know when people
are against globalization, if they are against the
globalization conceived according to the
cartographic globe, or if they are actually doing
something entirely different, which is resisting,
maybe some good reason, the extension of the
cliched, standardized, very simple provincial definition
of what it is a human, how to calculate selfishness,
for instance, self-interest, and how to establish the
calculation of a common life, which means that actually
one of the questions why the notion of globalization
is so diverse, if you want, when we are right now
in the press always talking about people who
are voting strangely, because they are left down or
left over by globalization. Which one? Is globalization an extension
of the numbers of difference which register or
simplification and, in a way, an impoverishment
of a difference. And I think it's
a serious point. But the second difficulty
with the global is of course to understand
the life forms, which are themselves composing this
very thin critical zone with, as we know, from Jim Lovelock's
work and many others of system scientists is actually
resisted and made to be a critical zone by the
exchangers and overlapping of all the entities, which are
composing the life form-- which are composing the
critical zone, sorry. So this is what I call the Gaia
problem, which of course, Gaia is a very complex
set of metaphors. It's difficult
and old mythology. And it's not sure
that Lovelock was right in using this
old mythological term. But I think it's
very interesting to have precisely in
the hands of Lovelock, speaking of early Lovelock,
because now, he is a bit old. We will all be at the end-- not
to say senile, to be polite. But what is interesting is that
precisely a mythical figure, and a scientific figure, and
a disputed figure, and also a source of strange
religious cults as well. I'm not that much
interested in the cult part, but I'm very interested in
the link between metallurgy and science, because
exactly what we need, which is a sort of set of
concepts which allows us to gain the grasp on the
non-global and yet overlapping and connected set
of entities that is a great innovation for
me of Lovelock and friends and very important
contributor Lynn Margulis. And I wrote a paper
in Culture and Society against, to give you an idea
of the difficulty of what I call the Gaia problem,
of a book by a Earth system scientist called
Toby Tyrrell, who makes a scientific critique
of Gaia, of Lovelock, by using precisely a globalist
model of what the Earth is like. And it's a small
technical point, but I think it's
important to see the extent of which
the notion of globe makes us unable to have
the political agency necessary to handle the
ecological crisis, a very small, but very
interesting example. So Tyrrell is actually
reusing in his book, Against Lovelock, a completely
traditional metaphor, which has nothing scientific about it. It's as old as the fable of the
members [INAUDIBLE] of which there are many versions. And he says when
Lovelock talks about Gaia is actually supposing that
there is a super organism, which is called Gaia, which as a
sort of providential character and is governing the
life forms under it. And the whole strangeness
of the argument is that it's actually a
fable from political science and political scientists
know it very well, imported into Earth system
science to criticize, in this case, Lovelock,
which never said that. So it's a series of
misunderstandings, which I find extremely
enlightening, because it comes precisely for
someone who says I'm giving a scientific critique
of a mythical argument, which has been
made by Lovelock , as if Lovelock had actually
imagined that there was life and that life was actually
leading the life forms, which is, of course, often
associated with his name, but he never said that. Let me read just two
quotes. "Lovelock suggests that life has
had a hand on the tiller of environmental control." I love his expression
of a tiller, which is of course literally
a cybernetics metaphor and which proposes that there is
super order, which is actually adjusting, like a
thermostat, the life form. "And intervention of life in
the regulation of the planet has been such as to promote
stability and keep condition favorable to life," which
is quite extraordinary, as if you had something further
on top of all the overlapping entity, which could
super state, if you want, with a state metaphor, imposed
by biologists or Earth systems scientists, to criticize
someone who never said that. "A well-regulated
planet could hardly be blamed for being buffeted
about by the vagaries of celestial mechanics
and collision and can even be congratulated
for its multiple recoveries from the terrible devastation
of extraterrestrial impact." And here you see that
the figure of a state is actually a divine figure
coming straight from religion. That's why it's always
complicated to talk about the science of
ecology, because you never know if you're talking about
science, theology, politics, and if it's not the metaphor
of a state, which is actually sneaked in everywhere when we do
have a pumpkin jesters of let's think globally. So this is why we have to be
careful of pumpkins in general. Philosophically, and I'm
also interested in this part, of course, in my own
work on actual network theory is that the very
notion that ecology is made of parts and a whole,
which has been, of course, a bane of
the notion of ecosystem, is actually something which
is largely an artifact, I mean, in the literal
sense of an artifact. It's actually a
technical metaphor, which is used to understand
biological forms. But biological forms are
not made of parts and whole. They are actually
overlapping entities. And those overlapping
entities are actually not well understood if
you say it was part, and then you have
all the little part, and then you have something
which is not in any of a part, but of which is superior to
all of them, a sort of plan, and we are about 1 centimeter
from a divine intervention here. And again, it's an
artist who's very good at showing that, Damian
Ortega, because he showed in an ironic way that, in
fact, even for cars, it is a Volkswagen
Beetle, even for cars, you never have actually
part and whole. I had the pleasure of
writing a whole book on a subway, automated
subway on his question, because the very
way in which you invent if you are an
engineer and invent a highly complex
technical process is you actually
always need to have the interconnection and the
overlapping of the parts. It's only when the
technology is actually ready to be discarded
that you can extract the part from the
activity of the engineers as Simondon has so well shown. So the key question is
that of overlapping entity. If we take the
Margulis-Lovelock seriously, we have a very different
view of the parts and whole. We have entirely
selfish entities, except they cannot decide
where the limit of the self is and that the key invention of
Margulis at the small scale, as you know, and
Lovelock the large scale, which is that very definition
of a boundary of a self is precisely [INAUDIBLE]
of life forms, including boundaries of
a critical zone itself. So if that begins to give
you a handle of the question I was interested in,
of the notion of globe. And this is actually a
very interesting paper by Scott Gilbert, who took
a title of one of my book, but differently, and who wrote
a symbiotic view of life. We have never been
individuals and introduced the notion of holobiont,
which is taking up some part of biology
right now that always with the same
question, if we are not part and whole, but overlapping
entity, what becomes of the great question
of sovereignty, which has been imported from
political science and mythology inside biology and which is
now resisted by biologists like Gilbert and many
others to say, no, no, no, parts and whole
has nothing to do with the way life
forms actually develop. And that's where the question
of sovereignty at all scales and for all entities began to
be really interesting for me. And that's where
I was completely stupefied reading the article
of Nature, the first time when Nature is actually talking about
the notion of Anthropocene, with, as you might know, a very
interesting date of 1610, which is directly related to American
history and the ecocide and the genocide of Indians. But it's of a figure which I
want to mention for a minute. This is a very strange
figure, which is completely made of overlapping entities,
which is, of course, I mean it's not a
great work of art. But it's interesting to see. But it's made of
all these things, because no one has any idea of
what the Anthropocene agent is. So if we put all
of them together in a sort of blind giant made
of many different techniques in which sort of walks
blindly on the stage. And I could not
make the connection with Hobbes's frontispiece
of the Leviathan, except it's exactly
the same problem. I mean, it's a set of problems
around the notion of how do we assemble all those
different type of entity, except in the case
of Hobbes's, it's built an order and a
definition of state and a relation between the
state of nature and the state. But on the other side,
it's a complete mess. It's a mixture of
all sort of entity, which absolutely nothing
to tempt whatever, and who are simply overlapping
in the most chaotic way. So of course, if we wanted to
imagine what it is that a task, the multidisciplinary task of
artists, political scientist, et cetera, it would be
something like that, which is to try to re-imagine
three centuries later what does it mean to reorganize the whole
polity around the classical question that Hobbes had
invented and designed and ordered, so to
speak, in the middle, not in of an ecological crisis,
but of something we cannot ignore either, namely
the religious war. What is the God,
Supremely authority, which is supposed
to be leading us? What is type of knowledge
we can't account for? And here, of course, I
substituted the frontispiece to use, the famous book by
Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump. What is the type of
people we assemble? This question of agency at
the time of the Anthropocene is completely open. Who is the new agent of history? What is the [INAUDIBLE]? We learn the type of order and
the type of principle of law. Is it a return of natural laws? Something much more
stranger than that? And, of course, the cosmos that
is the distribution of agency, which is at the heart of all
the work of us many of you probably do as well, which
is this extraordinary redistribution of agency
now that we have become, in part, forces of nature. And as Oliver Morton said
in a nice recent book on Planet Remade, he
said in the Anthropocene, the anthropos is supposed
to be a force of nature. But the definition of
the force of nature is that is beyond human power. So if this is the
sort of situation in which we all find ourselves. But the task is that
any [INAUDIBLE] and also of interest, as interesting at
the time of Hobbes' Leviathan. So this is why I wanted
to get into this argument with the nice dotted lines
that Homi has proposed to me as a title, there is no
great surprise as why politics is slightly disoriented,
because the notion of where we are-- globe, nature,
Earth, critical zone is open. When we are in the Anthropocene,
this is still undecided, it's a great suspense that
geologists and stratigraphers are keeping us in. We said, we are not going to
decide before two more years, and then two more years
later, they say, no, no, we are not going to decide
before two more years. And here we are,
8 billion people waiting to know which
zeitgeist we are in, which is I think a very
unusual-- zeitgeist defined by stratigraphers. I think it's the
first time actually. But we are lost. We are disoriented. So this is my little attempt
at trying to find another way to orient ourselves. And here, I think
one of the ways to try to capture the difference
between the globe in all these definitions and this Earth
understood as a critical zone and not as nature, which
is too big a concept, is to imagine a sort of diagram
triangulation like this one. It seems to me that much
of a debate, including in this election, and,
of course, my big example is the terrible
event of a Brexit, because I speak as
a European here, is that people are agitating
between two poles which have organized
politics for very long. One of them is global
in all its definition. We are supposed to
move to a global view, and we are supposed
to be ascending towards some sort of
universal horizon, and somewhat, I don't know
how, many people begin to doubt that the globe actually exists. So what we see, and it's
very striking to see that we see that here,
but we see it, of course, in Europe, everywhere,
in my own country, in France, everybody
says, why, well, if the globe is not
going to be there, why don't we go back
to the land of old? I call it the land of old. But of course, because it's
a complete imagination, the France that
the National Front want to imagine as normal
relation with anything that Great Britain that
the Brexit want to gain. I know now they found
the ultimate proof that we are now
English again, which is to have the royal
yacht being re-instituted. And you have a royal yacht,
they would think English again. This is very strange. But imagine what would
be America great again. It's, again, not
in this direction, but probably something there. Actually, Trump said it
exactly that yesterday, that it was return, he
used the word return to what America was. So we all are, of course,
organizing ourself and establishing our position
of who is reactionary and who is progressive
along this line. But [INAUDIBLE] line has
no meaning if the two poles attract the number
two and the number one are actually gone. And they are gone. And this is what I think
is so interesting for me, it belongs to the idea of a
climate conference in Paris, is that when we had this
event, which was supposed to be a great event,
actually it was 12 December and not November, in
Paris, we had the COP 21st, there was an amazing
diplomatic situation. You had 189 nations
who had been asked to make precise
projections of what they will have as an
economy in 15 or 30 years. So every nation wrote this. I will do this, and I
will developed this way. It was an innovation of
the French diplomacy. So when you accumulate all
of these things together, there is no planet
corresponding to this. So it was very amusing
and very moving to see a diplomatic event
organized by United Nations not looking at the common
rise of modernization and the global, but realizing
that this horizon did not exist, that there was no way
you could project and push all of these 180 nation economic
project inside the closed boundary and the
somewhat limited boundary of the critical zone. So you had the
feeling, and here this is the moment when we all
celebrate with great applaud, and it's absolutely
normally to celebrate, because it was a great
diplomatic success. But what was also
moving is that you saw some sort of new
authority, not a sovereign, not a sovereign, but
something weighing on the all the nations
for the first time I think in modern
history in a way which even the nuclear agreement
never actually had, because it was not
all of a nation. Here it was all of
a nation, feeling the weight of an entity to
which, in some sort of way, they bowed to, which is a very
interesting figure for what I called Gaia, Gaia
as a simultaneously scientific and now a
slightly more political body. It's actually interesting
because Holland, who is not known as
a great philosopher, applauded and said,
viva la France! Viva [INAUDIBLE]. Sorry. Le Nations Unies! Viva la planet! How do you say viva? Long live the planet, long
live the United Nations, and long live France. For France, the United
Nations is fairly normal, because we are not supposed to
exist without being supported by the planet. Long live the planet, as if
all these little men here in Paris in [INAUDIBLE] where
by the applaud and actually to hold the planet
alive a little further, and that's true in
some sort of sense. So it was a very moving moment
of political philosophy, if I can say. But what do we do now? How do we orient ourself if
we learn that the globe is actually not there. I often compare that to
as if we were in a plane. We are in the plane
of modernization going to the globe, and the
pilot says, well, I'm sorry. But the globe is
not there anymore. So the plane turns around and
goes back to the land of old, because that's the
only one we know, Brexit, Great Britain, France,
I mean, a small island where of absolutely no
interest whatsoever where it rains over time. And we go back there, but it has
disappeared, because the land has disappeared as well. So there's no way. So the two utopias,
the two poles on which we organize
our line, which allows us to say this
one is reactionary, this one is progressive,
have actually disappeared. And it's a very, I think,
a lot of the anxiety and vacuousness of
present polities, I mean, the loss of reason, of
course, but it's not a question of populism. It's not a question of
people being backward or not enlightened enough. It's yeah, really loss in
between these two attractors, if I use the word,
which are themselves known to be complete fiction. So when people talk
about the passage to a new era of
politics, which is truth politics, or
post-truth politics, when was politics truth
politics certainly not in the idea that we
will all modernize the planet with the same
horizon of the globe. But there is a strange
feeling, which is everywhere, if you read the literature
on how people react to the present
political situation, but they have been
lied to in a way. They have been betrayed. And it's true they
have been betrayed, because they have been led
to transform their whole life to go to the globe, which
now people say, sorry, this globe doesn't exist. We would need, especially you
American people, five planets to develop. There is only one. So this is why it's interesting
to situate the third attractor and to reorganize political
orientation including who is reactionary and who is
progressives, who is actually late, and who is
advanced according to this third attractor,
which I called the Earth CZ to make
sure that you understand that it's a layer. It's very complex layers
of overlapping entity of which we know in
effect fairly little, but which is reorganizing
and allowing maybe to land to another place. And this place is
very different. It's definition very different
in its political organization, either from the globe or
from the old attractor of the land of old. It's new, of course, it's
completely reinvented attractors. So this is my interpretation
but, of course, it's open for discussion
of the vacuity and raucousness of politics now. It's a slightly more
charitable interpretation than just lamenting
the decadence of political argumentation. How do you want to act argue
about politics if there is no land, if there is
no territory, if there is no soil about which all
of the issue of politics are actually determined? I did an exhibition
several years ago about politics of things,
things politic, object-oriented politics, and so on. For that, you need issues, as
John Dewey very nicely said, you need issues, driving
issues you need the land. You need the soil. You need the precise definition
of where and when you are. But if you cannot tell people
where and when you are, it's not very surprising
they are lost. And it's not very surprising
that whatever you say, they think you are
actually lying. So it is something
which has nothing to do with people say
it's a loss of confidence in expertise. Yes, it might be. But it is something more, I
think, existential than that is that we are organizing
our political disputes, so to speak, along a
line going from one to two or from two to one
and accusing one another to be globalist or reactionary. But when the whole third
attractor is actually weighing the whole
political definition, except no one very
much talks about it, and we talk nature and all sorts
of other things and interest for nature, which
no one really gets existentially interested in. So I was very surprised and
interested by the debate yesterday and the two other
debates, but especially [INAUDIBLE], because
of the absence of this third attractor,
which in spite of the fact that, of course,
probably the millions of people who were watching will say,
wait a minute wait a minute, the whole shift, we
are landing, and it might be a hard landing on
a different planet, which has a different
definition of a territory. We are not sovereignty state. And what was so
interesting in Paris, it was not the
superposition of sort of the typically
Westphalian state, which we were discussing in Paris. They were all overlapping
because of the climate question. And they were not talking
about some global power either. They were not shifting precisely
in the path whole relation. They were shifting out of the
sort of idea of a sovereignty as a clear boundary. And I think it's an
interesting, for me, at least, very fascinating. The actions of the
third attractor is extremely interesting. OK, so I will finish with an
example of this sort of thing which mixes science, art,
and politics to give you a little sense of
where I'm going and maybe interested
some of you. Before the COP in
Paris in December, we decided in my
school to organize a simulation of
what, for many years, I've called the
parliament of things. But it is to organize a clear
dispute about the climate, but organize under real
democratic principles. And you see one example here is
that the kids were organizing 40 different delegations. And some of the
delegations were actually representing the [INAUDIBLE]
in a way which was actually interesting to watch. And to finish this
talk in time, I'll give you just a few
minutes of the film, which is sort of, I
would say, preview, I think teasing--
teasing of an event. [VIDEO PLAYBACK] [MUSIC PLAYING] - [SPEAKING FRENCH] - This happened in a
theater, by the way. - [SPEAKING FRENCH] - [SPEAKING FRENCH] - [SPEAKING FRENCH] - [SPEAKING FRENCH] - I'm pretty sure you agreed
to that earlier this morning, because that line
hadn't changed. Yeah. - [INAUDIBLE] - What? But India was going to
agree to the agreement. I don't understand it. - At the moment, we
are doing nothing, OK? We are the generation
of climate change. We will suffer it. We have the responsibility to
act, not just us delegates, not just us functions,
but also as individuals. I don't know what-- what
can we do about this? [STOMPING] [CLAPPING] [END PLAYBACK] - Though it was
just a simulation, but it was quite interesting
for one technical point, which some of you were here were
in government or constitutional law would be interested is
that the very fact that you had simultaneously state lobbies,
which were also present and non-human entities, the
former being of a nature, represented by the voice of a
student organized in the same way. Each delegation had five persons
representing each interest, if you want, and sometimes
contradictory interests, made an immense and
very interesting difference in the way
the negotiation went on, because when the
nation state tried to organize themselves
and take a decision, for example, the ocean
was raising the and say, and then the president says,
ocean, two minutes, the United States, two minutes, soil,
two minutes, oil industry, two minutes. The very fact that they were
all represented by the person, to use the Hobbes expression,
the human speaking in the name of interest,
changed completely with where the
negotiation went on. And it was a very
moving experience to see what is a complete
speculative idea, the ease with which this principle
of representation was actually possible. It was a great moment
for the kids, of course, but it was a great moment
for me of basic research if you accept or consider
basic research, the question we are raising and have
raised in this talk, which are necessarily linking
speculative philosophy, science, and art. I thank you very much. [APPLAUSE] - Bruno, thank you very much
for a very stimulating, precise, and yet, probing
discussion of the topic that I asked you to speak
about and you so gallantly spoke about it by leaving the
dots exactly where the dots are and not joining them. So thank you for doing
that, because that actually increases our interest in
discussing the issue here. Now, one of the
questions of agency that I saw even right through
the-- right through your talk was what you call describing
the modes of existence book as the notion of instauration. You alone, and I like
that phrase very much, you alone have the
competence to do it, but you don't know
quite how to do it. It is a fair problem
that you raise, and I think that's an
extraordinarily important issue, particularly
when you talk about the whole notion of the
globalism aleatory problem, not as if it's
there or not there. Just before opening up, I just
wanted to say something in this context, particularly in
relation to what you talked about at the end, the
attractors, this first, neither as you put
it, the neither/nor, what [? Le Conte ?]
called the [? vele ?], neither the Utopian or
neither the progressive nor the regressive. In the absence of an actual
terror, an actual displace, I was wondering at that point
whether in fact terrorism has become this thing which
is either at once both totally utopic and yet totally
dystopic, life and death. You never know where
it's going to come. It has a certain kind of viral
non-physicality about it. And yet when it happens
in a particular place, then you know it
happened in that place. And unfortunately,
the state always runs behind by
trying to then secure the airport or something. And so it seemed
to me that there was an emerging third attractor,
which is the notion of terror, which is the notion of
security, not just surveillance, but go back to Hobbes or
more general phenomenological existential notion of security. And even with the ISIS,
as we heard yesterday, I think this third attractor was
very much in the conversation yesterday when that section
of the conversation, which they called, I think,
the hot spots or troubled spots in the world. - Conversation. - Or dialogue. But this whole issue that you
described it is existential, and I just wondered whether
this whole instability of terror, not Westphalian even
though they wanted caliphate. Individuals, you don't
know exactly where it's coming from, when it will
appear, when it will not, the contingency, whether
that is something which overcomes the first
and second attractors, this sort of polarization. It's another kind of
relationality between part and whole where the
problem of iteration-- you never know when
it's going to come, but it will come somewhere, some
place, not today, not tomorrow, in Amsterdam, maybe
not in New York. Anyway, I just thought
I would throw that in as a response to that
very interesting final point. But today, my role is not
to engage you directly, but to engage my
wonderful colleagues. So let me ask Peter
and Diane to speak. And then if there
is a little time, I can add a third attractor
somewhere in there. - First, thank you, Bruno, for
a wonderful talk and a talk that builds on a great
number of other works that you've been assembling
over the last years. And I think that one of the
remarkable features of what you've been after has been
to try to join rather, as the slide that you
showed early on indicates, the artistic, the philosophical,
and the pragmatic attention to the nature of scientific
and technical work. I'd like to just
point to three areas where I think there's tremendous
interest in what you've been up to. The first is on the
local and the global. Much of your concern with
Gaia at a philosophical level has been as a
critique of the notion that we can go in a simple
assembly, kit-like way from parts, add to
the glue of relations, and come out with
some kind of whole and that this kind
of assembly kit picture of the
nature of the world is getting us into
all sorts of trouble with the environment broadly
conceived in the planetary, more particularly. In picture of the
Gaia, the Anthropocene has emphasized what makes the
fundamentality of the human to the scientific
in the separation of the human local culture from
a universal picture of nature particularly problematic. And I think that this
emphasis that you've put on getting at the ontology
of our approach to Gaia is important, because in a
flipped version of Kundera's book, The Unbearable Lightness
of Being, there is in a way, I think you're pointing
to the unbearable weight of metaphysics and
that we often impose in our metaphysics a picture
on the world that drives our politics, our science,
and our inability sometimes to understand nature
broadly conceived or Gaia. That is to say if we think
that the world is made up of a kind of billiard-ball
Newtonian physics, we're not going to understand
a great deal of why, for instance, we
need anthropology, or the other human sciences,
or the arts in understanding our situation if we
see the Anthropocene as fundamentally and inextricably
implicated and imbricated with the human, then
in contrary to that, we have a better shot at
dealing with the world that we have and are
altering so fundamentally. This brings us to the second
point that I wanted to make and that is that the unbearable
weight of metaphysics seems to build often in
your writing on physics, or I should say at least,
Newtonian physics as the enemy. Physics becomes the
science that is not attentive to the human
imbrication, that has a very primitive picture of causality. And this importation
of Newtonian physics into the social sciences and
the environmental sciences has all sorts of
mischievous effects. Now, even by calling
it Newtonian, there is a suggestion that
there is something else going on in physics. And I think the picture that
the social scientists often take from the physical
sciences anyway is highly reduced
and stripped down of much of what's interesting. I mean, even back
in the time of 1915 with Einstein's general
theory of relativity, he said that matter
is not like actors on an empty stage in a
theater, that it preexisted their entrance, that in
fact, to use a phrase that I love of John Wheeler's,
that space tells objects where to go. And objects tell
space how to curve. And so there is no
in-the-beginning story about there being space out
of into which objects enter, nor is the world populated
in some first moment by objects that then make space. Space, and therefore relations
in its most fundamental way, and objects enter together. It seems to me
this richer picture of is more amenable to
something that you're getting at metaphysically in
the relationship of objects, relations, parts, and wholes. Even this idea of scale, which
plays an important role in much of your thought in
contemporary physics going down to be the very small
often is fundamentally connected to the very big. The biggest black hole,
15 billion times the mass of the sun, is actually
in some theoretical way identical to the mix
of quarks, and gluons, and you hit a couple
of protons together. And the fluid, and
the turbulence, and all that happens
at the micro-scale actually is the same thing as
the turbulence of space-time around a black hole. Even one of the
things that Einstein hated about his own theory was
that it predicted black holes. He didn't like that, because
black holes indicated the very limits of
that theory it's said at the center of a black hole
all of our laws come to naught. Indeed, the singularity
there isn't even part of the space and time which
we are trying to characterize. So there isn't the idea
that you've sometimes discussed about the big
as being the overlapping aspect of the
smalls, that we don't have such a simple assembly, but
rather even the idea of scale is something that depends on how
we're invoking it is something that I think, in
contemporary physics, has actually a productive analog
in that the big and the small, neither is prior that
the big is in the small and the small is in the
big in interesting ways. The third and last
point I wanted to get at has to do with a long-time
theme of your work, which I find I'm
very sympathetic to, and that is the relationship
of nature and culture, at least the idea of trying to get
around the continuous obsession with an opposition of nature
and culture, Phusis and Nomos. And among environmental
historians and among philosopher literary
theorists, Raymond Williams, or Cronin, the idea that--
for instance, Raymond Williams talks about the city
and the countryside and opposes their opposition,
another one of those terribly mischievous
ideas that has backed up a lot of right-wing
rhetoric of the countryside as the pure, the
authentic, and the prior in the city as the artifactual,
later development and rather to see these as
producing one another. I think that perhaps
this idea of thinking of nature and culture
together put me in mind to think one of the most famous
passages of William James where he's talking about truth. But if we were to swap
out his picture of truth for that of nature, perhaps
we could reread or misread that paragraph,
something like this. "The trail of the human serpent
is thus over everything. Nature independent, nature
that we find merely, nature no longer
malleable to human need, nature incorrigible. In a word, such nature exists,
indeed super-abundantly, or is supposed to exist. But then it means only the
dead heart of the living tree. And its being there means
only that nature also has its paleontology. Its prescription may
grow stiff with years of veteran service
petrified in men's regard by sheer antiquity." And that idea that we face
a nature that's constantly in motion, all the
interesting parts of nature are not stable, not
fixed, but something that we are modifying
sometimes for the great worse and sometimes for
the great better, but that these technical
lands, these technical oceans, these technical atmospheres
that we live in give us an implication in the
world that does indeed offer the possibility of
thinking politics in a very different way, one which not
only in anthropology, but also in our art work,
in our literature, in our environmental policies,
and environmental justice, puts us into a world that is
not stable, but unfolding. - Thank you, Peter, very much. And thank you so much for
stressing the issue of scale as being what I think
you call Bruno constantly redistributive and folding. And I think that it's so
important, particularly when we talk about
globalization, because scale is not about size. It's about complexity
and interrelationships and iterability. So that notion of enfolding that
you ended with, Peter, was I think very provocative
and very useful. Thank you very much. Diane. - OK, maybe I'll pick up
on some of those issues. It's a really great honor
to be here, a pleasure, I'm very daunted to be on
this table here with you. I guess I want to say that the
main issue for me that you're addressing in your
presentation and the materials that you shared with us is the
question what is, or should, or could, be the politics
of the Anthropocene? And I think that's
a question that needs to be pondered not just
in terms of individual actions, but with respect to the
governance institutions that help enable our collective
future so in that sense, I see today's talk as raising
the possibility of the fact that we need to develop new
forms of sovereignty, that is new governance
regimes, in order to be able to connect the dots
between land, Earth, globe, and Gaia. Now, I know that already puts
me in a more optimistic camp than you, Bruno, because
the title of the talk was on not connecting the dots. And I do agree that part of
the concern that you have and that I share
derives from the view that current global governance
arrangements, something brought to life in the Paris
and Kigali agreements in the last couple weeks,
build upon and, in fact, reify the nation state as
a primary starting point for sovereignty arrangements. You thus are clearly arguing
that the embodied power of the nation state
has enabled many of the ecologically
destructive practices for which new forms of global
government agreements are now being sought in
order to clean up the mess. You also rightly argue
that when decisions remain in the hands of nation
states, even those joining in global agglomeration, the
chances of truly addressing the risks associated with the
ever-more-destructive march of modernity are
indeed quite limited. And we all here know of
the fraught debate that has and will continue to
ensue in so-called modernized countries now lead discussions
about environmental regulations that keep their own
historical gains and the Earth's losses-- gains
come through colonization and imperialism, et cetera. They are kept in place even
as these same countries are imposing high barriers to
other countries who are desperate to become modernized. So but I want to suggest that
one way out of the conundrum, or maybe we can talk
about this hopefully, is to imagine an alternative
form of sovereignty that is not tied so directly
to the nation state and that, in fact, recognizes
other territorialities of governance and
political practice, particularly those smaller
than the nation as well as the globe. I put this possibility
on the table coming from my own experiences
in an urban design school and as the author of a book
called Urban Leviathan. So when you put Hobbes'
picture up there, you had me right there. And I teach classes about
urban governance that encourage students
to think not only about the city as a site of
growing environmental risk, but also about the city as a
source or site of resilience in which new spatial
designs and even art projects from the
microterritorial level of the building and the
street, to the city, to the macroterritorial scale
of the city and its hinterlands, can provide new
ways of confronting contemporary
ecological challenges. Now, it's obvious the
changing conditions at the scale of a city clearly
will not address all the risks to the Earth that
are hurtling us towards an unstable and
darker ecological future. However, I would say that
activities undertaken in cities have an overwhelming impact
on aggregate Earth conditions unless they might serve as a
more productive starting point for new agreements that
could have global impact. Likewise, cities
themselves are connected through networks that
straddle the globe thus making it possible to have
two-way conversations about the local and the global. And actually, perhaps
most significantly for me as a historical
urban sociologist, there are historical, social,
and cultural differences associated with national
and state sovereignty that get in the way of
cross-national agreements. But the experience
of living in cities holds the promise
or the potential to create elective
affinity among peoples across many different
national contexts. In that sense, the
urban experience could provide a basis for
developing a common language about the embeddedness
of the human and the non-human experience
that remains elusive at larger territorial scales. People can really
articulate and tangibly grasp what it means
to survive or thrive ecologically or otherwise
at the level of the street and at the level
of the city in ways that they won't at other scales. As such, I would say that
the city is and should be considered the body politic
of Anthropocene, if you will, one that literally
unites bodies in politics around the grounded
experience of everyday life, almost a throwback to
earlier pre-modern period before the advent of the
Westphalian national state, scaled up the territoriality
as a political allegiance, and when it was
cities or city states were the nodes and
networks through which the global economy and the
modern project emerged. So let me end my remarks
by recasting these, and they're your ideas
as well, I would say, they're very much inspired
by what you presented today, through the lens of sovereignty. I want to come back to that very
critical and important concept that Bruno has put on the table. I think it's obvious
that I want to think more broadly about
sovereignty relying as much on the lens of scholars
like Benedict Anderson, who defined nationalism, and
thus national sovereignty, as an imagined community,
emanating from citizens and their meaningful
connections to each other rather than seeing nationalism
as an ideology imposed by a national state in the
service of sovereign power. I also want us to
consider that there may exist alternative
territorial scales of experience and
identity that can forge an imagined community, or an
alternative territorial form of sovereignty, or even
overlapping sovereignties, as one of your slides
mentioned the concept, capable of advancing
an ecological politics for the future. Finally, I want to suggest that
in order to discover and reveal these new imagined communities
and any new territorial forms of sovereignty
they might enable, we need to be more
creative in our documenting and understanding of the
scales and modalities of the actually
lived experienced, of the actually lived space. We must begin to understand
the phenomenology of how individuals might
collectively translate the experience of
local conditions into a larger ecological
ethos, which itself can serve as a basis for connecting
to the Earth and the globe, but do so through the
embrace of the local as a site from which a new
politics of sovereignty might emanate. - Diane, thank you very much,
again, the question of scale. A scale comes up again
like the prominent theme of what you're talking,
the scale of forms, smaller than the
nation, as you put it. And you talk about the
city here as a form of alternative
sovereignty or contra sovereignty of some kind. It seems to me that really
the title comes alive here, because maybe the
city and its forms of non-imperial sovereignty,
or non-hegemonic sovereignty that you suggest, is
because the cities may be dots that are not connected. So they're connecting the dot. The dot are the
cities, which are not connected in through the hole
in either part nor whole, but they are kind of
iterative networks of particular relationalities. So I think that you
certainly put on the table another way of
thinking of the city as a sort of connected
network and its agencies. I don't know whether
that actually fits with Benedict
Anderson at all, because he is so immersed
in the soup of the nation and its containment. He needs that containment. But thank you very much for
these provocative remarks. And now, we turn to Bruno. - What is my role now? - Now, your role, Bruno,
is to basically talk a little, entertain us
with some responses, and then we can open up. So your role is that
of the entertainer. - I'm starting to be
bothered by this thing here. - We admire it. - It's slightly
embarrassing. [INAUDIBLE]. And it's watching at me without
too much, actually, pleasure. - Look there. - OK, so I'll start with Diane. I think one of the
interesting things is to explore collectively the
notion of overlapping entities, because if they overlap,
actually in the simulation, the cities were very
important, and we presented as such, and
the network of cities, of course, an
ecological question is sometimes much more advanced
than many nation states. But it's still a problem of
scale, which is small and big. It doesn't capture overlapping--
and overlapping means that it's like a Hobbesian
argument for what is the ensemble, so to speak,
of representing ourselves plus all the
millions and billions of microbes and bacteria
composing something which has no clear boundaries,
which we call a human body. You talk about the body politic. We don't know much
about what the body is. So that metaphor of the body
politic is a complex thing. But what is
interesting is the need to reinvent just at the
time when people would want precisely to go back to
the notion of sovereignty, and that's connected to
the question of Homi, which is the border protection
arrives everywhere just at the time of
ecological crisis where it nothing
in physics probably but it means nothing in
biology, and it means not much in the future of politics. But we need to guarantee
what Peter Sloterdijk called the immunological
condition of existence as well, because whenever we
talk about nature as Sloterdijk says, nature is not a
place where we inhabit. It's a place where
other things happen, but certainly not life forms
in the concept of nature, of course. So it's a very
complicated question here is how can we retain
the notion of protection and multiply the type of
overlapping sovereignty. I have one good example,
a small example, which is the election in
Holland where they have a double system of election. We elect the Congress
and parliamentary people, but they also elect the
[INAUDIBLE] or something like that, who is the
one representing water. And actually, the
two authorities have the same sort
of legitimacy. And they occupy the same space. But one is for
humans, so to speak, and the other one is for water. Water is fairly important,
as you know, in Holland. And it's a sort of necessary
thing to have these two powers, so to speak. But it's interesting
that on the same space, the overlapping is possible
and many, of course, other innovations. The question is precisely
to avoid to say, well, borders are finished. And we can never go to
the global and [INAUDIBLE] sort of archaic
hillbilly people are attached to the local scene. There is an immunological
principle in the boundaries. But it's not necessarily
linked with the notion of border protection. Now, of course, it is
linked to the nation state. This is the European
problem, par excellence, and Europe had invented a very
subtle and complicated system of overlapping sovereignty
until the bloody Brits tried to get out of it, which is
amusing, because they are also the ones who invented the global
sort of regime of the globe. So it's very telling that the
first country which really invented the global market is
also the one who suddenly says, let's go back to the queen
yacht, which is [INAUDIBLE]. And of course, I answered
Peter and completely agree. Actually, I'm not
interested in the way-- am interested in a strange
way with some concept of political philosophy
have been transported into a plotted notion of
physics, which of course, has no relation whatsoever
with your practice and the multiplicity of
entity by physicists. But it become the
sort of-- when we talk about nature and
objects, we mostly sort of use a mixture
of things which can be completely
badly understood Newtonian physics, but a
lot of political philosophy, especially on the notion
of inertness of matter. And this inertness of matter,
which of course, historians, especially in your department,
have studied for a long time is a much more complicated
history than that. But it is the, how could I say? The common ways in which
we understand nature. And I'm interested
in what you say, I mean, because of a terrorist. In my experience, it
is the French state, and I think there is
some connection here as Sloterdijk says again,
it's an autoimmune disease. And people are fed back on
police, and army, and borders as the simplest way to-- it's
sort of benediction, police and state. We have no idea what politics
is, but police and state, that we know. It's the last thing which seems
like a state and authority. And in France,
it's exactly that. There is absolutely not
politics left except police. I mean, the police are actually
striking right now today. So maybe even that, [INAUDIBLE]. So the terrorist was a sort of
a gift of God, literally a gift of God for the remnant
of what the Westphalian state is supposed to be,
in some sort of sense. But it's not at all
the third attractor, because there is no-- I mean,
maybe I'm probably wrong, but there is no
vast contribution to the alternative
cosmology, as far as I can tell and a
complete indifference to the question of ecology,
if I am not wrong, right? - No, but it's a negative. I'm saying, it's the negative. But in a way, you
never know where the border is going to be. It's that the border is where
the terror act takes place. So the borders are
continually changing. So it's a negative of that. - The direct link there is with
the ecological crisis is with immigration, because here the
link is technically-- sorry, [INAUDIBLE] crossing boundaries. And what do we do with the
crossing of boundaries, the walls, is a
key question, which is the way in which
most people actually get the shock of the ecological
crisis is now from migration. And that's where the
link is most interesting. Yes ? - I'm wondering, and I wanted to
ask you, Bruno, and also Peter, because this is your expertise. But I'm just
wondering whether it's possible to take some
of these concepts that we've just been talking
about sovereignty, terror, violence, borders, and
use those to think more about the natural world
and if that is then becomes a discourse
that allows one to move back and forth between
the human and the non-human in a way. I'm not an ecologist. But it seems to me that we
could think about plant life, or that again, the natural,
I'm getting beyond my pay grade here, but to think a
little more about using those same sets of concepts. Is there some sense
of what we might-- the equivalent of a sovereignty
within the natural world? - Well, the problem I think
is we have too much commerce. The truth of it is very
difficult. But as you know, sociology was for plants. The Department of
Plant Sociology still exists in a dark place - Right. The organism. - --in Switzerland. But the problem is
precisely to try to not connect
the dots, that is, not immediately think an
ecosystem is part and whole. The resistance, and this
is why it's very important to work with
scientists and people from humanity and
the social sciences, because they can
help everyone to be attentive to the speed at
which the metaphor jumps from one to the other. It's amazing. I was amazed by this
book by Tyrrell. I mean, he's a good
scientist, and what he says is factually very interesting. But he has absolutely
no hint that when you talk about Gaia
as a tiller, it's a huge import of providential
and political thing which ruins this argument
and ruins the of course the accusations
against the other. So we have to be careful,
again, because when we mentioned the notion of the
ecological crisis, we are very easily lost
by the question of size. And the question of size has to
be studied in different ways. That's why overlapping entity,
the notion of small and big doesn't really work. This is why the paper
I sent you, which is a bit boring I'm afraid. I apologize for that. I tried to get into the
argument that Gabrielle Tarde is reintroducing the
notion of monad, because I think there
is something very interesting in the notion of
monad where precisely scale, it's not entity plus relation,
but it's something else which is at work. And one of my
interests in this field study I work with was as
scientists is precisely to see how far we can
go with them to find an alternative and especially,
of course, which is always the key, how to represent
visually these masses of data we have about this overlapping. I mean, it's a very
interesting case of cities, because if you begin
to represent a city, you actually, of course,
cover the whole-- I mean, if it's a big city, you cover
a large part of the world. And you don't cover. You connect. And all of these
overlapping connections are actually very
difficult to visualize. And now, with big data, I
think it's a major thing to do which is how to find
alternative representation. And then once we are
equipped with the alternative representation, we can begin
to think of sovereignty as something
different from the map and a non-overlapping,
ex parte entity. So it is a very rich combination
of exchange between biologists trying to get out of the
notion of the selfish gene, for instance, and
political scientists, and many other people. - I mean, one of the
things that strikes me is that many of our
considerations in your paper, your presentation, what I
Diane was talking about, some of my concerns have
been around individuation. What counts as an object? And that, in many
fields, has lost the sense of an
eternal stability, that there is a
well-defined boundary interior versus exterior. I mean, in politics the
lowest possible position you could have would be to
say that you can solve this by building a wall,
as somebody said. But that in fact, there are ways
in which our communities are configured differently for
all of the different things that we do. The way we distribute
water is not the same as the way we deal
with electricity, the way we handle food. I mean, the connectivities,
the boundaries are constantly fluctuating even at a particular
time, let alone overtime. And even the objects,
the organs of our body. We can see our heart is a pump. But now we know it's
much more than that. It has a biochemical function,
an electrical function, many other things,. Or the stomach, or hormones,
or any of our bodily systems are not as localized as we
once wished to imagine them. And I think a lot of
the debates in ecology have that same function. It's like, what is
the relevant system? And that doesn't
have a unique answer, even at a particular time. It's not just that it used to
be local and now it's global. It's that it was always
all these different things. - I think you're completely
right that the notion of individuation is
a key thing, right? It's very interesting
to see that happened in all sort of places, in ants,
as well as in cells, as well as in nation states. - Permeability is what you talk
about in this paper very much. Can I just ask you, as
we have only a minute to go, when you talk about
the third attractor there, you always give it--
you always also read it from an aesthetic point of
view, that the construction has to be beautiful. The construction has to be good. There's also there's
always that aesthetic idea, and I don't mean a aesthetisized
idea, but an aesthetic idea, an ethical idea, that is
part of your assumption about the way in
which things connect or the unfolding process. And as somebody
interested in aesthetics, I've always wondered about
it, the good construction, which you talk a lot
about in your book. - I did aesthetics as rendering
oneself sensitive to things. So for me, it would
be the aesthetic of science, which is the
instrument by which we begin to become sensitive
to, for example, a watershed. And there is the
aesthetic of politics, which is how do we hear the
voices, voices, so to speak, which is a rendering
sensitive to. And of course, there
is the aesthetic, which has been sort
of simplified or re-institutionalized
around the art, but of which the art are
not the only appropriator, nor the only maker,
which is very important. And I'm always interested
in these three aesthetics together, because
as Peter just said, it's very difficult to get out
of the notion of boundaries, borders, and so on,
without complete invention into some of them
come from [INAUDIBLE]. I mean, this
beautiful piece you-- I'm sorry for the horrible
view I gave of Sara Sze's work. But I think it's an absolutely
magnificent example, and I immediately sent it to my
friend Joe scientist in Paris and said, this
lady was an artist. And so, at least three
or four of a point we are trying to source
in our representation of a critical zone, precisely
because of the multiplicity and the non-boundedness of it. It's not bounded. Yet, you are in it. So she found my aesthetics,
a beautiful example of something we are
struggling with, the scientists I'm working with. - And also artists and also
writers, because language is not bounded. And we're always in
the middle of it. - Last week with Richard
Powers, the great novelist. I had the privilege of
spending a week with him, and he is writing a
book where the agent and the main
characters as trees. Again, where are the trees? In the forest, classical
question, [INAUDIBLE]. One of his arguments
is that the bumper crop that we have today
of oaks coming here is actually
collective strategies of trees to find with their
competitors, so to speak. It's a very clever
trick of trees. I hope he is right. - Well, in these
Anthropocenic wars. Let's now turn to
some questions. There's a mic. Please line up. We have 10 minutes
for questions. - It's a great honor
to hear you all talk, not just you Professor
Latour, but all four of you. Thank you very much. My name is Jessica Gienow-Hecht. I hail from Berlin. I'll be your colleague
Professor Latour next semester for one term. I am afraid my question
is somewhat conventional. But what I wanted
to ask you is what do you do with the question
of power in your tale? I understand that
in your scheme, which is kind of a tripod,
you are urge us to pay more attention to the third
leg, the Earth, and yet, power so far has dictated that
most of us in our perception oscillate between the
palace and the globe, mostly because of questions of
power the nation state promises us, and that's its power to
solve the problems that we cannot solve ourselves, while
the globe exerts a power of attraction. There might be potential in
terms of mobility or employment or whatever that may
make things possible that we don't have access to. What is the power of the Earth
in order to make itself heard? You're appealing to our sense. - The power is attraction. It's a very interesting
question, because very sightly, there is something slightly
boring about the Earth, which is it doesn't-- it
has nothing spectacular. - Exactly, but how does the
Earth then brand itself? - Sorry? - How does the Earth
brand itself in order to develop a power of
attraction, which in your tale, is what it has to do? - I don't know. I mean, this is what
worries me a lot, because there was
something-- very something exciting about the globe,
very something nostalgically exciting about going back, even
towards an imaginary community. And there is something
precisely, [INAUDIBLE] word, earthly,
mundane, down to land. And there is
nothing spectacular. And also, that's the work
on the critical zone. It's extraordinarily
localized and idiosyncratic, because precisely,
we have to relearn the skills of as you
said, re-localizing many of these entities. It is very, very
difficult to have a sort of generalized
concept, which is exactly the
opposite of what we mean when we go to the globe. So I have no I have
no answer to that. It's a very worrying question. We all have to turn to something
which is less spectacular. Now, I have another version
of the same argument, which is the opposite, which
is to say, in one way, it's as extraordinarily
interesting and progressive than the old question of the
16th century discovery of land, new land, new land which I
had been-- when we destroyed the inhabitants first. So it has something about
the Age of Discovery, but it's not the
land in extension. It's not unfortunately
where we wiped out the people who were there. It's a land in intensity. And it has some sort
of the same fabulously interesting and troubling
meaning than the 16th century. I think there's lots of
reason why we associate now lots of things in music,
in art, in theater with the 16th century, because
there's something very similar. But of course,
it's not the land. It's not the discovery
of land res nullius. It's is the land where
we are all sharing the disappearance of the land. And this is a very interesting
element of anthropology now is that we learn
collectively what it is to have a land under
your feet disappearing. Before, it was precisely the
tragic discovery of those we had-- the land of
whom we had occupied. But now, it's something
which everybody in a way-- it's a new universal
anthropology. So this is where power is. - Thank you very much. My name is a Ester Giftechein
from the Anthropology Department. My question is so how could we
think about the attractor three without the interruption of
the attractor one and two? What's your projection in that
regard, which the attractor one and attractor two, which
happen to be handicapped and biased in times of
the hierarchies they have been posing on
us all this time? What kind of a culture would
you project as emerging or would emerge in
the future in relation to networks and in relation
to what you defined as the attractor, what's your
concerns about that attractor three? Thank you. - Thank you. My definition of anthropology,
as you might know, is a diplomatic building,
diplomatic encounters, between basically conflicting
cosmologies, so to speak. So I'm fairly interested,
and your question is very interesting, because
what I'm trying to imagine is where instead of saying
globalization is gone or you should not try to
go back to the land of old, I think it's quite
interesting to see what other property to reopen the
discussion with those who are simultaneously repulsed
by the globe and attracted by [INAUDIBLE]. What do they want? They want protection. We all want protection. It's not something which is
wrong to want protection. But protections is not
ensured by the rich-- in the case of Brexit,
again, I'm obsessed by that. If there is one thing
which is absolutely not protected to England
is to go back to their little, boring island. So but they want protection
is a sensible thing to ask. And the same thing with the
negotiation about the globe. There was something absolutely
crucial in the globe. It is a multiplicity
of differences. But if you [INAUDIBLE]
the globe is the extension of the same set of cliched
and standardize indifference, it's a big chance. So what I'm trying to
imagine it is how can we build a political orientation,
the same thing which has been done in 19th century
with a social question? After all, we
invented with masses of people in the
social sciences, in activism, in religion, how
to handle the social question. The task now is
not more difficult, but it requires a
reorientation, because we have to deal precisely with
all this non-individualizing multiplicity, which we
share our existence. So that's what I mean by opening
a negotiation on this thing. - Two more quick
questions, thank you. - I'm Sam Smiley, artographer,
artist researcher, teacher. So I am kind of triangulating. So my question which may
have been sort of addressed in last one is what about
the question of asymmetries within the network? - Asymmetries? - Within the network. - Sorry? - Asymmetries
within the network. - What about it? Do you like it? - What do I like? - Do you like asymmetrical
relations within networks? Like it, or dislike
it, or neither? - Neither. I mean, the asymmetry
of networks, I'm not understanding. I mean, the asymmetry
is a different-- it doesn't apply very
well to a network. But what do we mean, exactly? Can you develop? - Yeah, so within a
network, the power relations in between the objects. It could be about power,
asymmetric relations. - Always there are
asymmetric relations. What would be a
symmetrical relation? I don't understand. Where would it be a place
where there's no power? What would be a
non-powered relation. I need to understand
your question. - I guess I'm making the
assumption that it was a power. It was that bringing
asymmetries out defines what you just described. - I'm not sure I understand. In all of this
question of ecology, we have to understand
we are at war. It's war. So the question of
power is everywhere. The pseudo controversy
about the climate, anthropic origin of climate,
is a declaration of war. The word negationist
has been used, I think, with good reason. It's a question of war. We don't want to live in
the country where you live. So the question of territory
and what we occupy a territory is completely suffused
with power everywhere. And the problem of this third
attractor is that, of course, it's slightly
boring, which is one of the prime sort of
statistic, as you say, and it's also an absolutely
major question of war and peace. So if this was behind your
question, yes, we are at war. - That's why I
emphasized the negativity of the third attractor. The last question. - Hi, I'm Fernando Rosenberg, a
teacher at Brandeis University. One notion that I haven't heard
in the discussion of the panel is the notion of rights. And I want rights. And I wonder,
because the Bolivian and the Ecuadorian constitutions
recognize the rights of nature. And this is a very
problematic notion that has been widely discussed. But I wonder if
you see any future for a universal declaration
of non-human rights or post-human rights in which
what are the entities that to which these
rights are recognized is defined on a
case-by-case basis. - Well, I think here we
need a ritual to Pachamama. That would be the polite way
of answering the question. Let's have a ritual. And Pachamama, of course,
is a very interesting figure introduced into
the constitution. I think this constitutional
invention will multiply. But it's not us who attribute an
agency to Pachamama or to Gaia. It's Gaia which is coming
to us and requesting, and we bow to this
sort of not exactly authority or sovereignty, but
something which is certainly something, which
even in the Paris was amazing in this sense. These people were not assembled
by the horizon of modernization and the global modernization. They were assembled
by something which were impacting on all of
them in a strange way. So in a way, we have
already these figures, which is not in
any constitution, but it is weighing
on us in a way. And that's where I think
all of this invention where there is a declaration against
ecocide now working everywhere. There are people
in this country who have attacked their government
for not-- in Holland, I'm sorry, for not actually
protecting the environment. So this will multiply. Lawyers are rich
since the famous paper by Stone many, many years ago. The law is as often
very much in advance of many of the
philosophical concepts we used to talk about there. - Thank you very much,
and before calling to this who is
already here, I wanted to say that one of the issues
we have not talked enough about is the question of temporality
and the different temporalities in the work. But time always
runs up against us. [INAUDIBLE] - There'll be plenty
of time to talk at the reception
on a smaller scale. But I just want to ask
you to join me in thanking Bruno Latour and our panelists. [MUSIC PLAYING] [APPLAUSE]
