Bruno Latour - The Affects of Capitalism

[Music] on behalf of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and letters it is my privilege and indeed my great pleasure to welcome you all to this lecture a particular welcome of course to our distinguished speaker professor bruno latour Latour whose work will be known to most of you at least partially I shall return to this work in a short while but first I must convey the large idea behind this series of Royal Academy lectures in the humanities and social sciences which this is a second but certainly not the last the main charge of the Royal Academy founded in 1742 in the heyday of the European enlightenment is to sustain and promote basic science at the time knowledge was seen as a means to social progress and new human freedoms since then of course the perception of the world has changed considerably and it has become clear that neither progress nor freedom is easily let alone universally achieved what has also changed is the idea that the world and its constituents could be definitively mapped classified and organized into Magnum and C encyclopedias that could be consulted by anyone and give definitive answers while scholarship is still devoted to an understanding of the world we now know very well that this is always in the making and that we cannot simply open the book of nature and read it for what it is the same applies to society and culture and with this particular series of lectures we have wanted to stress the role played by the human and social sciences in knowing the world this implies an acknowledgement of a human and social dimensions of knowing the world which is rather different from discovering it and also of the deep entanglement of natural and social facts the series is sponsored by the cosmic foundation which I gratefully acknowledge a foundation supporting both the natural social and the human sciences and thus recognizing their equal value you will hear more about that by the chairman of the foundation after the lecture this said I shall turn my attention to today's protagonist the eminent scholar who NOLA - and when I said initially that most of you are of us indeed at least NOLA to us work partially it also covered the simple truth that to know it all would be and would have been for a long time a full-time job the prolific ax C of our speaker is amazing and the relentless reframing of central questions is tantalizing the field is constantly opening up in new directions small wonder that he was awarded the whole back prize last year in 2013 for his vital contribution to the social sciences allow me to congratulate you after the fact but NOLA Tova has indeed been one of the most influential thinkers in the social sciences broadly defined since his early work on laboratory life co-authored with Steve ulka and appearing in 1979 travelling freely in the intellectual landscape between philosophy sociology anthropology and Science and Technology studies Latura has over and again invited his readers to take a fresh view of the world and to transcend the dominant cat Oracle opposition's such as modern non modern culture nature human non-human incidentally laboratory life was my own first encounter with a lecherous work and I still remember the excitement when reading it and later reading his science in action for me it was also a hint of landslides in French sociology or social philosophy focusing now suddenly on activities rather than structures and on open-ended social forms and insights rather than well-founded schemes of existence and knowledge this tendency has been further developed in succeeding works but the foundation of science now a well-established international field in his own right was led here it was based on a dawning realization that science and technology were deeply entwined with politics and culture this could not but Romy and of course many others in these early work works were not simply opposing a particular largely structuralist tradition however because a position largely reproduces the malaise of the opponent as we know and seen from outside of the French tradition there are also certain important intellectual affinity affinities to tradition from do claim over live ystos and onwards at least if nothing else in the insistence on the value and necessity of intellectual work and in the engagement with actual social realities and in the opening of new avenues of thinking about them another affinity is with between in that's what work is with American pragmatist philosophy founded by thinkers like William James and John Dewey in the last part of the 19th century and stressing the intimate link between knowledge and practical processes and social concerns in early 21st century the American pragmatist philosopher hero but not seeing himself more or less as a descendant of Jewish suggested that we now find ourselves in what he calls a pragmatic enlightenment which like the previous enlightenment lend my enlightenment to which I referred earlier is distinguished by a radically new vision of knowledge on the one hand and of social justice and ethics on the other it's being pragmatist means that this new enlightenment is solidly anchored in the shifting ground upon which people lives their old to practical lives I am NOT of course suggesting that lecherous work is simply an instantiation of a set perspective the towards work in many ways offers its own dynamic perspective upon the world being a moving frame for thinking about it and about our own placement within it as citizens and certainly also as scholars for many his work is intimately tied up with the actor Network t theory of the a and T which Latour is indeed one of the founders and pre-eminent exponents since his early works on the makings of scientific knowledge in brief ent suggests that stresses the associations between diverse elements that all of them have a degree of agency in the world among the agents are both humans and nonhumans it is important to note is that while the word network is now a common currency in diverse descriptions of human technological relations what matters for Latura at least in my reading is the perceptual quality of networks constantly emerging with new practical associations the network should not be reduced to a description of an objective reality it refers rather to the ongoing creation of new salient connections on a personal note when the truest book reassembling the social from 2005 landed on my desk eventually happened sort of a couple of years after I was on my way to the field I dropped the book into my back and went north when in the field I devoured it hungrily and it became a vital ingredient in my approach to the world within which I was temporarily located in other words it had deep practical consequences in my fieldwork not least I would add in its important discussion of scaling the social that once and for breaks away from the idea of well bounded communities on the one hand and the relative scale as a matter of size or sooo on the other so inadvertently the book itself became an actor in my perception of the field and thus exemplified itself beautifully I probably stretching the audience but patients already by now but before leaving the float on alert I must mention his contribution to a discussion of modernity the sparking together a number of salient books that have entered into new and extensive networks of knowledge these are books like we have never been modeled and Pandora's hope both of them from the 1990s and the more recent inquiry into modes of existence an anthropology of the moderns the point is that the self-declared moderns never really succeeded in fulfilling their own universalizing project and that they are also products of particular cosmic politics based on conceptual dichotomies that ones were taken for real including the modern and non modern crystal mala Jie and ontology again I would like to highlight a favorite chapter at least my favorite chapter in Pandora's hope the one on circulating reference sampling the soil in the Amazon forest this particular chapter shows through careful participant observation how factual knowledge in this case of soil is established through horizontal moves between different material forms and different vocabularies this shows in detail how scientific knowledge happiness and how that dichotomy between ways of knowing that is epistemology in brief and the world itself or ontology cannot be sustained in practice it also shows how human and non-human agents perform at the world as perceived it is important of course not to mistake this for a kind of social constructivism that potentially turn everything into discursive products because follow to the materiality and the politics of interest of social opportunity and of Technology cannot be bypassed in the delineation of facts there is no way of course I can give the body of lecherous work due consideration but I can refer you to his home page which is singularly rich but I excuse myself by reminding us that an overview would actually not make anything precisely because the pertinence a particular insights and concepts shifts from one situation to the next and from one reader to the other whence also my small person with personal anecdotes it affects its readers and at the actual moment and place of reading and this is the point also the larger point in let us work as I see it actual situations and practical concerns are the driving forces and the source of the dynamics of the world and the almost sound Jun like quality of lecturers work always sliding under your feet and keeping you alert and intellectually alive just like pastor one of lecherous protagonists happened to the microbes and made them appear I would say let that Latour has happened to the social and made it appear in a new way this deeply affected the social sciences and our individual placements within it for this we are grateful not least because it keeps us attentive to emerging associations and freezes from subscribing to set forms today for now will happen is a lecture entitled the effects of capitalism subtly unsettling us already by a single surprising phoneme the a in effects we shall now hear about the place of economics and anthropology and sense how a new collective emerges in a process of thinking please welcome if a word we're bank there should have already buried out such as verse Shogun painted by Greenpeace militant in one of a recent campaign it says a lot about our level of intellectual corruption but we don't find such a line simply funny but tragically realistic it has the same bleak degree of realism as Frederick James on famous quip but nowadays it seems easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism if you call the world I mean the one we live in first nature and capitalism our subhan nature in the sense of what which we are fully Abbot rated and which is fully naturalized then what those sentences are saying is that Seagal nature is more solid less transitory less perishable than the first no wonder the transcendent word of Beyond has always been more durable than the poor word of below but what is new is that this word of Beyond is not that of salvation and eternity but that of economic matters as Karl Marx would have said will of transcendent has been fully appropriated by banks for an unexpected turn of phrase the word of economy far from representing a sturdy down-to-earth materialism a sound appetite for worldly goods and solid matters of fact is now final and absolute how mistaken we were apparently it's the law of capitalism but Jesus had in mind when he warned his disciple heaven and earth will pass away but my word will never pass away this inversion of what is transitory and what is eternal is no longer a joke especially since what we should be called the Australian strategy of voluntary sleep walking toward catastrophe is being implemented to the fool after the last election no content to dismantle the institution scientific establishment an instrument that could prepare this constituency to meet the new global threat of climate mutation for Prime Minister Tony Abbott is also dismantling one after the other most Department of Social Sciences and Humanities well so to strategy makes a lot of sense not thinking ahead is probably when you are an Australian given what is coming the most rational thing to do not thinking seems to be the slogan of a day when you consider that in the United States lone according to the Guardian something like a billion dollars is being spent to generate ignorance about the entropic origin of climate mutations in earlier periods scientists and intellectual lamented the little money spent on learning but never have we to witness floods of money spent on unlearning what was already known while in time past thinking critically was associated with looking ahead and extracting oneself from an obscure aunty's past today money is being spent to become even more obscurantist than yesterday AG note ology Robert Proctor's science of generating ignorance has become the most important discipline of a day and its ank's to this great new science that so many people are able to say in the heart parish the word provided my bank survived it is a desperate task to continue thinking one of the powers of intelligence are dedicated to such to shut down thought and to march ahead eyes wide closed what is there in this circle nature that generates shut lack of sensitivity to the worldly condition of our existence battery prime I propose we tackle today I will take capitalism to mean not a thing in the world but a certain way of being affected when trying to think for V strands mixtures of miseries and luxuries we encounter we're trying to come to terms with the dissing Inter players of good and bad capitalism is a concept that has been invented to help absorbing this odd mixture of enthusiasm tonic for the cornucopia of riches that lifts billions of people out of abject poverty with the indignation rage and fury for the misery visited on billions of people especially troubling to me is the feeling of helplessness that is associated with any discussion of economics and that I have so much trouble week on siding with what I consider science and politics main effect that is to open new possibility and giving more margins of maneuvers how come but when we are asked of Shimon to combat capitalism we feel artists I feel so helpless so I will start with society but one of the effects of capitalism that is of thinking in terms of capitalism is to generate for most of the people a feeling of helplessness and for a few people an immense enthusiasm together with a dumbness of census so when we use capitalism to interpret what is going on we obtain on the one hand binding necessity for which there is no escape and a feeling of revolt against them and on the other boundless possibility coupled with a total indifference for their long-term consequences this odd mixture of faith discouragement and obras is certainly not the way in which first nature was initially encountered neither helplessness nor unbound enthusiasm and in deference to consequences would have allowed humans to inhabit the earth for very long rather a solid pragmatism a limited confidence in their cunning a sane respect for the powers of nature a great care invested to protect the fragility of our enterprise this appears to be the virtue with which first nature was dealt with care and caution a totally mundane grasp of the danger and of possibilities of the world of below and a reading of Tim in gold or Marshall Sahlins or any anthropologist of Stone Age economics will convince you of this point first nature is neither mastered nor indifferent nor infinite it is often said that the reason why struggle nature is so solid and transcendent it's because it's being governed by laws of economic just as a channel and just as solid as laws of physics I heard actually is also repeated we have a day on television but today it seems more difficult to pile the laws of civil nature on top of a first apparently climate scientists are using the laws of physics to register what happens to first nature while climate denier our pickings for laws of economics Saguna - against Veloz governing the earth in one set of law for instance co2 plays no role at all while in the other set of laws it's one of the main culprit what a strange fight of nature's in the pole should we be prepared to say that we know who is much greater precision what circle nature is than our first nature is being run should we say that economists have discovered the kind of certainty of indisputable 'ti but is superior to the laws of physics but where co2 is more real than climatologist co2 then Wimpy's would be right if the word well bank they would have already bailed it out but what this is not case it will be obvious for any practicing scientist we've a biologists chemists and indeed economists physicists testing calculating combining the laws of nature I mean first nature does not generate a feeling of helplessness no of being faced with undisputable necessities quite the opposite in the laboratory I have always observed the slogan of a scientist seem to be not quite obama's yes we can but at least yes we could and discussion among peers proliferate at once so the closure of who you are from science the more possibilities open up the more intimate your contact with first nature the more surprises you get the more unexpected agency spring up the more margin of manoeuvres you obtain is this not the experience we all have when reading and writing scientific literature in science when causes and consequence are being described possibilities are multiplied why is it the kid but when you shift to civil nature and that causes and consequence are being described then possibilities vanish and a deep feeling of helplessness set in why is the subtext of any allusion to capitalism the sad sentence sorry there is no other way and this is said even though economies themselves are disputing angrily at one another so it's not the unanimous agreement that can produce this feeling of helplessness when confronted with the laws of subhan nature remember president truman quip please send me a one-armed economist because it was tired of hearing his counselor say on the one hand this and on the other hand although economists are of course affected by capitalism and may be affecting capitalism they are not the only reason why the result of their research always appear in the end as the figure of faith why is it that fade the old fat room to which no human can escape always brought in connection with modernization modernization modernization that define itself or at least that used to define itself as untie fate dikes arose there must be something so poisonous in the idea of capitalism that it has such an effect on thought as to render as James unsaid any alternative unthinkable the history of such a poison has often been made in itself a distribution of unbound possibility for son coupled with binding necessity over many is as old as commerce long ago fair knob hotel has shown that any marketplace a first occasion multiplied of course by financial tool for some enterprising go-between to treat friends and family as utter stranger and far where stranger our close buddies capitalism in vats and feeds on parasite and distort marketplaces the two set of mechanism as fair no border should relying on totally opposite set of passion more recently David Graeber has reminded us of a close link between our me depth state money and market this age-old or at least on time old combination that lies at the heart of a drawl pair of state and market up to these days such a redistribution of bounds between friends and stranger in tonalities and externality what is that close at hand and what is far away defines an occupation of space-time against which societies as Karl Polanyi said have always tried to protect themselves until the 18th century and with great success but as you know such an age-old resistance has been broken by the contingent concatenation of three elements to stay within polanyi's description the steam engine but drastically increased the size of a production and was made the space-time extension of capital much larger the technical invention of self-regulation mechanism and you remember the governor of very important in politic of economy and the eruption of a new discipline that of economics entirely devoted as Michel Foucault as so powerfully shown to convince intruders to keep out of its inner working - which of course should be added the unexpected land grab of colonial empire this indispensible expansion to another land of the development of what had no land of its own and a problem which is still with us as you know how many lands how many earth do we need for economic development there are people doing the calculation for the American it's 5 for the Danes it's 2.5 still it's a lot of Earth in that sense the history of economic thought is very story of a constant addition of protective layers to render more and more impossible for intruders but it's politicians first and when ordinary people to meddle in and to give to the phenomenon it protected from scrutiny all the contraption of an alternate nature working automatically this process of naturalization has been observed and denounced since Karl Marx if it's easy to read in the figure of invisible hand the end of a Providence its meaning maybe more trivially summarized by this warning addressed to all of those who would like to put their hands in what concerns them must keep your hands off what we are dealing with it here is supposed to be on tallien natural self regulated automated and beyond anyone's command that's restrained history because at the time 19th century nature was red in tooth and claw according to the famous argument but his the nature of Malchus we projected by Darwin on first nature the point here being that it was impossible or immoral to try to limit the misery or to save the losers so social Darwinism became second nature but what is really remarkable is that during the two last centuries the very notion of the two natures of exchange where properties first nature entered the Anthropocene Anthropocene is a period of geology invented by Genesis to characterize the moment when you become a geological force I mean not you and me individually but collectively it's a big crowd actually here big big geological force in terms of co2 produced by breathing but if you put all the humans together and the industry and agriculture via the main geological force according to some geologists that's what they called Anthropocene and I'll use this expression to describe what happened since the last war the two nature have exchanged the property first nature hasn't entered the Anthropocene where it's now hard to distinguish human action from natural force and which is now that's a great irony full of tipping points Peaks storms and catastrophe while only struggle nature it seems has kept the older features of indifferent timeless and fully automating nature governed by few fundamental and undisputable law totally foreign to politics and human actions that's a great paradox the two nature's have exchanged their historicity totally different now from the old idea of social Darwinism remember the time where we were talking of economy as the laws of a jungle well now who has the laws of a jungle Disgaea which now threaten to make it to take its revenge and to get rid of whom of capitalism let us try and transformation of social Darwinism we'd love Locke the revenge of Gaia what does Gaia does this will you meant disappear that's the law of the jungle and no one's mentioned that to the point that as Timothy Mitchell as recently argued in carbon democracy just at the time when the limits of first nature became really apparent but his around 1945 was invented for good what he called the economy a form of infinite and boundless domain totally indifferent to terrorists to your existence and to the very notion of limit an entire self-centered and self-government whereas we're still existed before the war in what was still called political economy the idea of scarcity and allocation of rare goods the economy began to be entirely unmoved from any limitation Domenic pest has shown that this process of unmoving what he called infinite ization has occurred once again around the 1970 when the first report of a club of home tried to bring first nature to everbearing on the limits of struggle nature in a matter of few years limits had vanished from economy and any connection between first and second nature had disappeared it is really at this time that James sons quit McCann began to become realistic the laws of capitalism after this inversion became infinitely more durable important infinite let's use the word transcendent than those of geophysics and geobiology those new Sciences trying to catch up with the Anthropocene which is now human action mixed with geology Karl Polanyi if you remember at call economics a secular religion to designate what had happened in the nineteenth century and it was convinced poor soul that certain religion had been totally discredited when he published in 1949 the great transformation how little could he have anticipated that such religion would be so greatly transformed but it could finally realize its transcendent goal and reach for good the land of milk and honey at the end of the 20th century at this date when the last enemy of communism and itself disappeared the economy seems to have reached its extraterrestrial status unbound at last unregulated infinite just at the time that's a great irony of our time when ecological mutation had finally warned everybody to be prepared for an even greater great transformation than what was expected and this juncture the two nature's have exchanged their world for good so if you want to get a glimpse of what could have been the idea of nature in the 18th century that is before the advent of the Anthropocene read The Wall Street Journal it's capitalism now that appears to run like the older nature of your Lucena cycles while first nature the one in which we all live offers now the highly complex agitated troubling and catastrophic portrait of science morality controversy and politics all mix up historicity has changed camps it's the earth that is undergoing subversion at a dizzying pace and it's the economy but his civil nature they still run like funny enough now that this Gaia looks like a dangerous jungle you don't hear so much talk about social Darwinism anymore and that's by the way might be the reason why people who deny climate change also don't believe in evolution but just a supposition those who try to understand the amazing extent of a war against the knowledge of climate mutation don't have to look very far the now totally transcendent religion of economy as against the totally eminent science of youth everything happened as if economy has remained stuck in the Holocene order scenes were period before the Anthropocene it's so Auto seen economy can't say no if you want to be very chic oh it's so odyssey ten thousand years of quite very quite climatic situation in which civilization is gone this is what panics the scientists working on that ten thousand years very quite that's the time when civilization was born and now it's all in the entrepot scene modifying economy has remained stuck in the old scene so this is why I think mr. Tony Hobart is very right not thinking ahead is the only rational solution denying the result of climate science has become the shiver at telling friends from Falls in our civil wars but the key point is that the adjective natural as change camps that's what pits ecology against the economy they are not dealing at all with the same nature so which one will win will define a time whenever there is poison there should be a search for a counter poison how to find it by looking at how capitalism but is thinking with the concept of capitalism effect the thought and I think you are many of you unlike me when you hear the word capitalism we take it as a model that is as a marching tune but marching toward which front line I might disappoint some of you but other throwing capitalism does not seem to be a very good solution it appears that capitalism and roar is being overthrown as long as it's taxed as a total system to be totally subverted because quite naturally the more systematic you are the surest you are to resist any attempt at being over fraud I mean that's what the system is made for it depends how you read was sad experience of a 20th century but it seems to me that the net result of such an attempt at revolutionising capitalism and that should have been abused from the start has been a triumph of capitalism and a fantastic increase in its systematic projection in the search for total revolution only the adjective total remain in the sense of total head necess on the part of a loser and even more total totalitarianism on the part of a winner as a concept distributing unbounded enthusiasm an absolute necessity which totally in deference to the long-term consequences capitalism has been indistinguishable from its twin communism and as you know deep a shock Abbate made were a very nice point but if it's very great but Soviet never won't because the ecological crisis would be twice as difficult now it will I did would have been and still is actually the new spectrum that hounds Europe is not communism but what could be called the new Chinese syndrome according to which you could feel helpless in more ways than one total lack of political freedom associated with the total domination by crony capitalism with total destruction of your lived environment all of that in the name of radical modernisation when I hear that China shows were well to the future I shudder even more than when I hear that Mr Abbott has got another protective agency total revolution is a poison not to count to a poison and a poison even more toxic when you draw from a century of failure the conclusion that you were right all the same even though you fail so drastically that's a pretty infectious thought since you deny that any experiment could change your mind failure should be certainly allowed to make you learn something it cannot be transmuted into the inner comfort of being right because you so miserably fail to escape from the grips of capitalism such in deference to experience attack of soul and as created with deserted political landscape we live in when those who call themselves were left and even the radical left are simultaneously sure of feeling and sure of being right like science politics are planned possibilities it cannot be associated with failure and helplessness if you have failed it's not capitalism you should revolutionize but rather your ways of thinking if you keep failing and then don't change it does not mean you are facing an invisible monster it means you like you enjoy you love being defeated by a monster this is a case of psychopathology or better as Eric Vogel himself of animal pathology a form of spiritual masochism not of courage and yet the mole upper ground is still occupied by people who give lessons to the other from no other authority than having failed this merely to change anything we begin to see how difficult it is to disentangle the universe contradiction values effect of capitalism let's count them it generates a prodigious enthusiasm for seizing unbounded opportunities a dystopian feeling of total illnesses for those who are submitted to its decree a complete disinhibition as to the long-term consequence of its action for those who profit from it a perverse wound of smug superiority in those who have failed to fight this progression a fascination for its I wanna know for those who claim to study its development to the point that it appears to run more smoothly than nature itself six but total indifference to have a soil on which it's rooted is occupied seven a complete confusion in whose would be treated as a total stranger and who as a close neighbor and above all it marks a movement toward modernization but Dave legitimate those who stay behind as so many losers actually now that capitalism is thought to have no enemy it has become a mere synonym for the implacable rushed forward of modernization from this tangle of effect I get no other feeling than an increased sense of helplessness the mere invocation of capitalism renders me speechless I think we should abandon the world entirely you remember Hamlet's expression in marks 18 Brumaire well done old more you know the more little finger top in French I hope it's right well well it's not your language either what sort of mole would dig down enough to subvert in VN not capitalism but the effect generated by this odd way to read history and to give an expression to our passions and to our rage and indignation is there an alternative it appears that the solution will not come from dialectics remember capitalists digging their own grave but from first nature how ironic it is to think that so much saliva has been spent to save higher value from the risk of commodification when the question should rather to bring this all Enterprise down to earth but which earth how to resist the transcendence of capitalism padding as in manners for the sake of time let me phrase a possible alternative as a set of thesis and you will forgive me for listening eleven of offices I will start from obvious reason with the last one the eleventh thesis eleven economists have either too only changed the world in values way the point now is to interpret it one and this is the result of a discussion in part we had for two days at the Copenhagen Business School with some of my colleagues who are here so they will forgive me if I pilfered where some of the argument economics and its associated retinue of skills and trades that is accounting marketing design merchandising business organization study and so on do not make up a science studying a material word but rather a set of disciplines in charge of extracting from the social and natural another word that would have remained transcendent without this violent act of pair formation and performative is of course very important well here second thesis economics as a discipline as help formatting local market organization which are entirely mundane makeshift Affairs depending so much on culture law geography that they should not be in any circumstances transform into a system and especially not of course as a natural system using the old nature the word law in laws of economic should be understood as in civil laws a highly revisable affair in the end of a polity not as the law of transcendent word of beyond in the ends of an invisible daily free to be radical a radical critique of an unfair destructive and unsustainable system should abstain from falling in the trap of fighting a system it's because it's not transcendent and because it obeys no super your laws that any market organization may spread and that's wide also it can be amended modified reformed or we organized for if it's true that the word economy and the word liberty are linked then there is no reason why this liberty should not be expanded yes radically expanded to all the devices experiment instrument voting mechanism shares and stock that constitute the artificial and constantly we work at a momentum of the economy liberalism means not letting anything go not letting anything past five to be radical that is to be liberal an interpretation of the working of economy and its market organization should be of his earth no transcendent power is at work neither God nor man if economy inherits from the old or economy ax but is the dispensation by God the Creator in all theology then it should inherit all the qualities of Providence that is the suspension of faith and slavery and domination all of us concept where in the old idea of economy ax it is blasphemous to use Providence to mean the inflexible path of faith imposed by an invisible hand six you understand the tall night take a tone adjusted to be for your back pieces of those so it has to be a bit grandiose and syrup six but one sentence of a word of Beyond has been displaced in this world of below to the point but the special and time coordinates have been radically subverted space has become indifferent to place soil and locality friends commensal allies have been treated as complete stranger future and past have been aligned on an inclined plane as if the future was nothing but the repayment of depth contracted into the past transcendence has been turned into a utopia Newtonian physics natural history Darwinism cybernetic immunology computer science each intern have offered countless models for economic necessity and of course of them self-made abundant use of economics and organization models to develop a concept but appeals to nature should not be a pretext for asking even more people to be absent from the automatic working other cycles of nature 8 the wide expansion of a reach of market organization has quitted indeed a global domain of transcendent reality 2nd nature that is now clashing with a mundane imminent down-to-earth other globe that of planet Earth namely Gaia very very very different from nature since it has historicity reactivity some say sensitivity and certainly path the new fight between those two globes define our time I'm Oliver onwards where I am at the ninth or minced there is nothing native Aboriginal eternal natural transcendent in the habits that have been formed during the few centuries where market organization has taken a global reach or more economical in its subjectivity calculative skills cognitive ability it just as much a historical creature than the good it has learned to evaluate and to buy and the vast urban and industrial infrastructure in which they have learned to survive so what has been made so quickly in such a short period of time can be unmade just as quickly what has been designed can be redesigned there is no fate in this landscape of inequalities just the slow building or irreversibilities now that historicity are shifted from the stage of human action to the backdrop of human action namely from shegaon to first nature activists should alive himself with the globe against the global tense and conclusion back to earth you darienne's thank you very much I shall be very brief here this late time I guess you all are eager to get back to Professor Liu or for his and get question to him for his excellent lectures here the video say on behalf of the carpod foundation that I'm very happy to be here today to see so many people here as you know the cosmic foundation have actually donated the money to help this series of Royal Academy lectures in humanities and social science and as the president kissin has taught mentioned before this is the second in a row and this was a really outstanding Kleck to him let me just say a few words about the cosmic foundation I'm pretty sure that least with this audience here you all know what cow's book is all about it's to a large extent about beer making beer high-quality beer but it's also a a brewery with a fantastic heritage and fantastic history the founder of cow's book mr. Jacobson here founded cows book back in 1847 that was acted to outstanding Brewers here there was the file on the son if you go out to Bellevue you to see the origin of the true breweries here the old house burger new Carlsberg here the file had a very strong passion for science he met with the leading professor to Copenhagen University professors in chemistry and biology he knew that that was the way to make very good beer and succeed in doing that but he also came to the conclusion in 1876 that he acted donated his brewery back to society riot through science he came to the professors of Royal Danish Academy and basic donated his food - loyal Danes Academy you cannot have an entity of 200 professor running a brewery so he established a smaller government model with the cosmic foundation five professors elected among the professors in the Royal Danish Academy and they have begin got the chance to actually run also the brewery the son Kyle was octo also a fantastic work but he also had a strong passion for history and fond arts and I'm pretty sure many of you at you know that many of Kyle's actually every time he showed more appear here and more money he bought new arts new sculptures and that's what you see today in the glue boutique the cosmic foundation have basically two options here I mean one of them is first of all to make sure that the brewery is running very well we're doing our very best in this year hope you invest in the Carl Perkins book she is there but the other main thing of the councillor Brewer is that the dividend from the shares from the brewer is actually giving back the cosmic foundation is donating around 200 million kronor a year in basic science within natural science humanities and social science and therefore I think it's also very appropriate to have this series here also in humanities and social science I'm very pleased with the cows Book Foundation that we actually have this interdisciplinary approach boost the Natural Science Peralta humanities and social science a few words about the brewery it started out with a local brewery in Copenhagen today Carlsberg is the fourth largest brew in the world we eye in mainly three regions here Western Europe Eastern Europe not least Russia and in Asia we are selling an awful lot of beer and also making an awful lot of money here ten billion DKK turn around and it's acted dividend on our shares today the Carlsberg foundation still owns around thirty point three percent of the shares in the cows berg foundation so we are certain in the main shareholder in the Carlsberg brewery as i mentioned before there's a close link between the brewery the cows Park Foundation and the Royal Danes Academy and he actually came with the letter to the Royal Danish Academy established the cows Book Foundation and again as I said not only being chairman of the cows Park Foundation I also have the privilege to being chairman of the Supervisory report of the Carlsberg brewery besides the counts book foundation there's also a new cosmic foundation which first of all takes care of the group to take but also donates around 80 million kronor a year to us in the Danish society besides that we have another fantastic Museum the Museum Natural History the Frederick's for Carson which is act department C in the free Carlsberg foundation and then also the to poor foundation and I'm sure many of you know about that the concert or skillet festival and among other things we are sponsoring the Casper from today's have decided to sort of focus on a number of different areas here not least sponsoring fellowships to young people here young people finishing their PhD travel around the world become international networks here go to the best universities around the world staying out there for one or two years and we take some of them back again giving a new infrastructure integrate them in a Dana Society we sponsor a lot of research infrastructure here and finally we also sponsor a few of larger interdisciplinary projects and there again I would like to mention interdisciplinary will really like to see the sprits in the gap between natural science social science and humanities again you can go to the cards but website and you will see a number of different examples is for you young scholars more slightly older scholars here sponsoring projects here whose individual projects but also sponsoring project to larger research societies here so I would right now just finish here saying that the reception out there and it cannot be a big surprise for you that this calls for Casper [Applause] [Music] [Applause]

Channel: Videnskabernes Selskab

Views: 48,710

Rating: 4.8675499 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: 8i-ZKfShovs

Length: 60min 46sec (3646 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 28 2014

Reddit Comments

[u/MrSamsonite]

Glad to see Latour is still in the game! Can't wait to watch.

[u/neoballoon]

I wish he were a more engaging speaker. I love his ideas but he's better read than listened to imo.

[u/mizenplace]

I haven't watched the video, but I have to start reading "Science and Action" to apply to a neuroscience research project I'm working on. He seems very interesting and I'm excited to learn more intensively about actor network theory and his approach!