Prof. Bruno Latour - Inside the 'Planetary Boundaries': Gaia's Estate

good evening I'm Larry herado Emeritus professor of New Testament in the University of Edinburgh and a member of the gord's committee and it's my pleasure to be able to introduce um Professor lure's final lecture in the series facing Gaia a new inquiry into natural religion uh can I remind you that um this lecture will be is being recorded and will be available shortly on the gford website and is also being streamed live to various countries around the world I now have the great pleasure of handing you over to Professor lur for his final lecture entitled inside the planetary boundaries of gaia's estate would you join me in welcoming him the first time I closed behind me the door that kept the pressurized air inside the 26 met high white Cube on top of which the artist Thomas saraso had inserted fre superimposed transparent plastic envelopes where visitors appear to be moving with great Andy enjoyment I made the mistake of believing that they could jump or even fly but I soon realized that visitor were more like insect about to be stuck on fly paper they could crawl turn around roll on one another but no they could neither jump nor fly saraso had managed to find a way of rendering fully concrete The Experience from shifting from history to Geo story by making the decor itself become a recalcitrant an unexpected participant in every movement of those who were literally embedded in it not only was it the case that every visitor influenced all the others by changing the air pressure or by forcing the plastic envelope to take a different shape but when you yourself tried to crawl on all four it was the sudden and Powerful reaction of a thin plastic sheet that took on suffocating presence in fact to use the Expression I introduced last Tuesday visitors were learning to lose the feeling of what it is to be a human jumping on Solid ground or flying freely above it they were experiencing what it is to be Earthbound to land that move just as much as them there is no sense in engaging an audience in the political Theology of nature as I have done for two weeks if at the end a collective does not emerge that belongs to a clearly delated territory a people who are owed with a specific mode for which all the agency of their Cosmos are being distributed and AR raade who possess a precise Touchstone to tell friends from foes a diplomatic reach wide enough to engage in pars into potential allies and who are summoned by an entity a Divinity a god a set of God a god function through specific ritual that would make such a people conscious of their existence what I've done in this lecture series is ver a sort of thought experiment in demog Genesis an attempt at creating artificially a people out of those who suffer under the univ universal bondage of naturalism a people able to liberate themselves from a cult of nature not to reach the promised land of milk and honey but more prosaically to settle on the earth that they had fled because they had mistaken it from some holy imaginary Pagan Divinity in this last lecture I want to bring together the various thread are assemble and if possible to spark life into them I have to confess that I feel a bit like Mary Shell's character trying to UNLV a character made from a range of disjointed Parts snatched from morgs and cemeteries but contrary to Victor of Frankenstein I know that failure is a necessary ingredient of such an attempt and that the inventor should not flee in horror and abandon his creature as Victor did simply because it start so monstrously so far everything happened as if it was impossible to enjoy the simultaneous presence of a people a soil or an earth and a science we find people without science nor soil science without soil no people people with soil but no science how to get the free together such is the puzzle that we have to solve first the soil as we have seen earlier everything that was part of the background has now morph into the foreground there is no environment anymore and thus no longer a need for environmentalist we are postnatural for good with the end of political epistemology of the past that ensured the presence of an undisputable outside Arbiter namely not nature known by science we are left without a land and thus without a body politic I remember that many years ago when I began my research sociologists and historian were scandalized because actor Network fairy claimed to follow association between humans and nonhuman in a continuous way how timid my anthropomorphism was at the time of the anthropos scene remember that when there was a modernizing frontier That was supposed to move forward by separating science from politic the art domain of facts from the disputable domain of value how difficult it is today to recognize an arrow of time that would distinguish for good what is from what ought to be when it is what is that is requesting its due if you can still dispute whether we have never been modern or not who now dispute that we will never be able to modernize the Earth for lack of a five planets this is a calculation in global hectars that would be needed to push our endless froner to the same level of development that North America things have changed so fast that it's hard to keep track remember when H Jonas had to appeal to the welfare of future generation to bring their virtual ancestors into virtual motion now it is our generation of that of our children whose faith is ter ing Us in the F in the face remember how people laughed derisively when Michel s offered to enter into a natural contract on an equal footing with nature as if humans couldn't hangle in the ropes of law now we would be happy to still have such a tame partner in front of us when it has become the angry Beast that we are poking with a stick the Bengali tiger in the Life boat of a story of pie Remember When when people believe that at least there existed Indian deep in the amazian forest or Aborigines in the central Australian desert or Highlanders in the mountains of New Guinea who knew how to live peacefully in touch or even in harmony with nature now every ethnographer has learned that nature is a narrow historical and contingent concept that no traditional people has ever shared except when they have to seduce Nos and pop st into defending their cause against a new dam or a new mine remember how many intellectual used to Shake in excitement at the term deterritorialization as if nomadic existence was the new ideal of two comfortably rooted City dwellers now the same people look desperately for a land for a terraa where they may weet terize again without being accused of being reactionary remember our centuries of Christian Cults image metaphor and prayer sent Believers away to Heaven eyes turn upward wishing to upload themselves away finally from this B mortal earth below now they realize so terribly late that they had misread the gospel and that instead of what good would it be to possess the word if you forfeit your soul they should have heed with other Sterner injunction what use it is to save your soul if you forfeit the Earth what has happened is that there has been a confusion between on the one hand nature and on the other this local historical subla oos of Gaia in earlier time when we were mentioning the presence of a natural phenomenon as soon as you had past the mythical threshold of society culture or objectivity is it was as if everything else from the bowels of your body to the Big Bang from the soil beneath your feet all the way to the infinite expanses of the Galaxy was made out of the same stuff belonged to the same domain and obeyed the same intangible lws suddenly we find ourselves thrown into two a completely different space Gaia is not nature G is the localized historical and secular Avatar of nature or rather nature appears retrospectively as the epistemological politicized religious fabulous extension of GAA hence a surprising result which inverse what the modernizers have been totally lost Transcendence has been misplaced if nature could have provided us the Hope unifying and pacifying politics or at least providing a stable backgrounds for the vagaries of human history it's not the case with Gia GAA makes no promise of peace and provide no stable Decor so much about the soil what about the people as we saw Tuesday it seems that humans are pretty bad candidate to play the role of the anthropos of the anthropos scene just when we need politics to replace the older Covenant of political epistemology we don't even know how to name the citizen able to compose such a limited and expanded body limited because it can no longer count on infinite nature expanded because it has to absorb the presence of Gia however those human character are understood as neod darwinian bodies feuded with homoeconomicus and there is no example of such calculating robots ever being able to take their limited above into account they are irrational for good or they are taken as subject whose entire occupation consists in trying to escape from what they take to be the cold and Dean animated domination of objectivity would a better candidate be the resilient and biophiliac species advocated by E Wilson but the poor the downtrodden the exploited cannot be made part of the same species as their exploiters such wilsonian peace proposal will bring the apolitical and historical element of nature for back door unfortunately it won't do either if the agent of geost story had to be the Revolutionary Humanity of the Marxist Utopia since as Shakti dryly remarks had the proletariat succeeded in destroying capitalism for good pollution would have been even greater than today thanks to the fact that vast masses have remained in abject poverty would it be possible to accept the candidacy of those people who claim to be assembled for instance by pasam Mama the her of goddess maybe but only if we could be sure that what passes for respect for the Earth is not due to their small number and to the relative weakness of their technology none of those so-called traditional people the wisdom of which we other we often admire is being prepared to scale up scale up their ways of life to the size of a giant Metropolis in which we are now Coral more than half of the human race obviously at such a juncture what would be needed is a multiplicity of Engagement and a proliferation of manners to behave as human on earth bad luck that just the time when under the name of globalization the same definition of what it is to be human equipped with exactly the same set of calculative skill the same narrow limit defining what it is to be an individual the same standardized ways of life the same appetite for consumption the same limited range of communication and information the same format for feeling responsible the same laws of ownership in brief the same version of the economy are supposed to reain everywhere on Earth to explore the numbers of the earth there is no instrument other than the tiny range of patterns provided by management and government just at the time when first n had began to loosen its grip the second nature of the economy impos its iron law more tightly than ever funnily enough in Ria as CH side as long as modernism at elsewhere humans were happy to live divided bated into the realm of the necessity on the one hand that is concatenation of causes and consequences and on the other the realm of Freedom that is the creation of law morality Liberty and art the stringent necessity of nature against the freedom of proliferating culture the geohistorical event that I'm trying on those lecture to underline has turned this divide upside down acceleration Revolution quick Pace catastrophes upheaval Tipping Point that become part of a common vocabulary we use to describe what happens to the former realm of nature in fact suuna GAA and to describe a former realm of human history of law mentality and politics what is V vocabulary we use indifference hysteresis rigidity Den now irreversibility loin and yet even inable necessity the power of invention and surprise has shifted from humans to non-human as in very Frederic Jameson famous quip but nowaday it seems easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism what is sure is that glaciers appear to slide quicker ice to melt faster species to disappear at a greater spear than the slow gigantic Majestic inertial pace of Po itics Consciousness and Sensibility sh today would be at pains to chant the Everlasting Universe of things since we have stopped believing that waterfall will leap forever and that a vast River of its rocks will seiously burst and raav if there is still enough of a Chasm to feed the mixture of Gloom and Splendor that goes into the feeling of a Sublime it's not because we witness poor transitory human agitating themselves on the stage of an everlasting nature but because we are asked to witness obstinately dumb humans sitting impossibly Frozen while the whole former Decor of the old the plot is passing away at a frighting speed soil people everything has mutated what about the science if to the situation is novel on the one hand nothing about Gaia reaction variety consistence and composition can be sized up without chains of monitoring instrument large collection long-term Expedition well situated observation station powerful model Etc wherever the instrument go our sensibility increases wherever the instrument are interrupted our sensibility dims and then disappears here science is the new athetic able to render us sensible to where we are standing so in a sense never in human history was a situation so totally defined by the span quality and data flows of Science and yet what is so troubling is that the standing and status of the science bear almost no relation for the to the modernist ideals of the science capital S on the right here the left sorry of the recent past far from marking the Triumph of particle physic and of cosmology able to deduce every other agency from first principles our Sciences lower cases resemble more the good old disciplines of Natural History all sort of humble and despised trade from meteorology to agriculture from ethnography to n clature from stratag graphy to apology all having a say to follow this or that minuscule and unexpected twist in the narrative complexity of Gaia all forces to get out from behind the laboratory walls and into the vast and conflicting Earth all forced to share the result in full public view Big Data vast administrative Machinery computer model multiple local controversy Wonder cam what a confusion and of course because those many interlocking and divided Discipline Do not command the same respect and do not appeal to the same Authority as the past remember when science study was accused of unduly politicizing Science Now controversies over matters of concern cannot be solved like dispute of a matters of fact by a mere extension of scientific method and resumption of a fight against irrationality the accusation of being rational cuts no ice anymore because scientific discipline have become coextensive with all the form of life how could scientists defend their inside Fortress of their science against the invasion of the masses from the outside when they treat at scale one in real time the very Outside Inside which all of those masses reside people no longer fight for or against science they decide for themselves where with whom and with which agency they wish to live which oos they are ready to defend against which other oos no matter if old word for household ends up with numers as in economics or logos as in acology it is no longer able to unify or to pacify how disappoint disappointing such a post epistemological situ situation must be for those who dream to be the people of nature those who claim to belong to aab remember the first lecture those who prided themselves for not being a people for having no Cosmos no politics and no God mixing in one single continuous rest extens the Supra lunar and the sublunar condition making the local ring of entangle feedbacks that we have called Gaia continues with nature without realizing the extent of a gap the vast nonquit between the two so never has science become so vital for daily life and yet such is one of the reason for the disarray in which I think we all find ourself we have to turn to the scientist for Revelation and for decision just at the time when those same scientist are most unable to play the role of Kings on the throne is a tragic figure more frightened and more divided than those we have to guide to reattach to people a soil and a science we have to raise again the question of shapes and limits and ask the earthlings by the border of which territory they are ready to be bound by which line they accept to be drawn by which ties they wish to be entangled fortunately the same scientists who devis the notion of anthropos scine have also proposed that of planetary boundary inside which it would be possible according to them a to draw a safe operating space for Humanity human of a modernist breed have ignored the question by defining themselves as those who are always escaping from the bonds of the past always attempting to pass beyond the impassible Columns of aules plus Ultra has always been their proud Motto by contrast Earthbound have to explore the question of their limits not because they are forbidden by some outside power to do so but because their Maxim is plus intra they cannot rely on any older version of what used to be a soil a lamp a plot or as we say in French a ter not because the fear being reactionary and moving backward if you remember the dancer last Tuesday moving backward is what they have stopped doing when they stopped believing they were modern but because there is no way to squeeze their ways of life their techniques their value their vast number their City inside the narrow confine of what it meant to belong to land paradoxically in order to determine their limit Earthbound should break away from the limit of what they used to think of a space the narrow Countryside they were so eager to leave as well the Utopia of indefinite space that they were so eager to reach geost story requires a change in the very definition of having holding or occupying a space of what it is to be appropriated by a land needless to say that those limit cannot be dictated from the outside simply because they have been objectively determined by the laws of nature and transported as a piece of pure information to everybody through generalized education bounded by such limit those people would be once again enslave to nature maybe human but in fact deep inhuman maybe without God but in fact prisoners of a cult of nature more Pagan than the pagans whose Idols they are so proud of having smashed no those limits have to be felt they have to be generated they have to be discovered they have to be decided from the inside of the people themselves as we know from without decision there is no body politics nor Liberty nor autonomy in those lecture we have learned to recognize several of those lines that are able to give a shape to the oos to the house to the Abode inside which Earth bound may decide to live let's Trace once again the dividing lines of our Geo story and of our geopolitics and see whether or not one superimposed they succeed in attaching at least some people people inside the planetary boundary they have decided the first of these lines of territory tring that we have recognized under the old name of namos and that defin the geopolitics of the earth geography that is the writing inscription mapping surveying and inventory of the land is of course the oldest and best known case of his geot tracing activity so is geology no one can belong to soil without this activity of space tracking plot surveying and line tracing all those Greek words noros CFOs logos of the same gay gaos or Gaia but Earthbound are not land surveyor cartographer of geologist looking from above at the flat surface of their well delineated map their discipline is no longer geometry and Optics but rather biology and natural history the initiative of naming and surveying no longer come from them to the land that they have appropriated by a sovereign gestures of domination as we have recognized in the third lecture the lines that they are learned to trace thanks to their instrument have the shape of unentangled and retroactive Loops those Loop don't start with them toward the map but from the landscape back to them and more often than not they come back with a vengeance each of his Loop register the unexpected reaction of some Outside Agency to Human Action because of his responsiveness what is a territory has been entirely subverted it is no longer the old pastoral landscape of the well delineated Fields out of which crops are slowly and Faithfully coming to frion at in Arad ego a territory is everything that you need to survive and that may suddenly fail you such a plot is not a well delineated but it's made of Highly surprising network of unexpected connection jumping up at you be they fish fall air soil carbon protein or rare Earths there is nothing pastal in looking at it far from being the land appropriation the land n celebrated by Schmid it's rather the violent reappropriation of all human titles by the land itself as if territory and Terror shared a similar route such is the Meb strip in which we are now unentangled such is the experiment in which unwittingly the anthropos of the anthropocene has been placed the Earthbound learn their limit by feeling the V vient reaction of what they do to modify their ways of life more and more desperately but this time experiment are not safely confined inside the Laboratories the Earth is the laboratory inside which experimental are imprison whereas as we have seen earlier the atlas of a scientific revolution could hold the globe in IT hand scientist of a Guan counter Revolution I'm sorry to say look more like ticks on the main of roaring Beast this is why geost story does not have the same tonality as either history or geography each limit each Loop has to be collectively narrated collectively lamented collectively replayed and ritualized by the public who is not simply listening to the tentative result of a science later to be scaled up and applied but thown in real time inside the unintended conse quence of a full scale experiment which started with application and was only later caught up by hastily drawns Loop of reflexivity retroaction there is indeed but after the fact and maybe too late the thread of tragedy does not have to be spun only by the Olympian gods of old human might be perfectly able to spin it with their own hands they just have to find themselves unentangled inent that have preceded them by a few centuries back and to which they have no control any longer this is why we need to trace and seasly retrace again the line made up by all those Loops as if the old distinction between science public art and Civic space was quickly Vanishing all those obsolete distinction are much less important than this strong injunction keep the loop traceable and publicly visible or else we will be blind and helpless with no soil on which to settle stranger to our own land that's what the anthropos scene is about a really Ole Tale But contrary to adus we should resist the temptation to Blind ourself at the revelation we should face it head on and look at what is coming the second line that can be qu atively traced is the direct consequence of a first whatever is reacting to our action loop after Loop begins to take a consistence a solidity a coherence that for sure does not have the technical predictability of a cybernetic system but which nonetheless weigh on us as a force to be taken into account this is what happens when you keep adding the the response of the ice sheet to the response of the acidity of the ocean to the response of thermo Alin circulation to the response of biodiversity and so on and so forth such an accumulation of responses requires a responsive agency to which you yourself have to become in turn responsible here again the performances end up generating a competence behind cumulative response it's hard not to imagine that there exist a power that does listen and answer to Grant hit a personhood is not simply that it may speak and think or that it exist as one single substance no more than you would do with a state but that in the end it has to be recognized as a politically assembled sort of entity what count is that such a path as the ability to steer our action and thus to provide it with limit loops and constraint which is as you know the etimology of the word cybernetic in that sense Gaia is indeed a cybernetic sort of being even though as I shown in commenting on LL it's not a technical system it's CTIC in old and frightening sense of the word such a power exerts a sort of sovereignty since it plays the role of a collective person that is to act as a collected body it should be given a collective name we do it for France or for Scotland and there is no reason to abstain from doing it for Gia since it's now clearly understood that it addressed not as nature but as a new political entity to live in the epoch of the anthropocene is to admit a strange and uneasy shift in power to the profit of Gaia taken as the secular Aggregates of all the agency recognized as acting back through Loops of retroaction of course G does not possess does not possess yet the legal quality of a Rua of a state of a great artificial levite and of H's invention and yet it's clear that the Earthbound are tied to GA in a very way than nature used to tie humans to her on one hand Gaia is much less personified than nature but on the other it does not claim to be outside or undisputable and does not pretend to be indifferent to politics whereas nature could Lord over human as a religious power to which a paradoxical cult had to be rendered GAA commands order binds as a secular not as a religious power when we begin to gather together as Earthbound we realize that we are summoned by power that is fully political one since it possesses what is called in anglo-american law radical title to the whole land that is a legal claim that has precedence over all the other property rights faced with such radical title the Earthbound understand that contrary to what humans keep dreaming they will never play the role of Atlas not that of gardener of the Earth but they will never be able to fulfill the function of Master engineer of space shift Earth not even that of a faithful and modest stward of a blue planet it's as simple as that they are not alone in common someone else has preceded them even though we have learned it a bit late it's called Power sharing the third line able to trace the shape of land is the oldest one that of politics what distinguishes friend from fors through a shibolet and which has to decide enmity in the absence of any outside Arbiter what is part and what is not part of a body politic is the outcome of a decision and this decision has to be renewed again and again thus tracing tracing around the people a constantly circular movement that's why I call it the political Circle that might grow or Shrink depending on the fate of battles and the generosity of the winners this is where geopolitics takes a new meaning masters of agency are given a voice and a say in what is at stake each trying to transform the loop that I've just stressed into the political Circle that grant them autonomy they obey their own rules but here on subliner Gaia this proud and venerable expression is applied to the former realm of necessity as well as to the former realm of Liberty if it was so difficult to imagine in which parliaments of nature the laws of nature could be voted it's not so difficult to detect the form where the laws of GAA are voted Ed registered recognized invoked discovered and enforced is this an extension of politic indeed it is how strange to have thought that only humans are Political Animals what about animals what about all sort of animated agency none of them should be Dean animated to the point of having no voice at all nor should there be other animated to the point of speaking in the comic repertoire of anthropo morphic citizen but all agency that Define a territory that is what is necessary for the subsistence and durable existence of a given agent are political agency once they are accepted of course as part and parel of a body politic information if it's always wise to ponder a the question how would have I behave had I found myself among the criminal of the past Century it's even more crucial not to find ourselves among the criminals when in this Century we will face the battle for the ordering appropriation and distribution of spaces and climate K Schmid credits the juus publicum European for having limited for two centuries the war that had burst out of all boundaries in the 20th century would it be possible to invent a successor to this usth publicum in order to limit the coming Wars of the world would it be possible to place this new law under the same oldest invocation what Roman legist called Santisima tus such a move would result in a completely new mode of action for the former laws of nature something that could be called use publicum toris still of course to be invented in order to limit the extent of what Schmid in his queer toxic and profound language i' call the wars for The Ordering of space an expression which once purged from his 20th century illusion is a good definition of echology fourth and last the fourth times of life so the fourth type of lines and limit is the one provided by accepting to live at the end of time or rather as we have seen in the last lecture at the time of the end although this form of historicity can be displayed with all the flashy colors and special effect of the Apocalypse invoked by long line of prophet told in the mysterious and frightening PR dictated by San John in Patmos it bear no more than a superficial relation with the apocalyptic stories coming from political ecology and from Hollywood movies before being puffed up into grandio big budget Cosmic scenes the radical rupture of ES catology should first be recognized in a lighter humble and more Pimon tone it is that tone that we recognize in the second lecture when I contrasted it with the question of belief especially of belief in God a belief that attempted to mimic an access to the far away without the vehicle to do so what I call religious to as to stress this difference with religion one instead of providing information about about distant State of Affair this Stone transform convert and yes resit those who are thus addressed by this message this good message those who hear it become close with one another Thy Neighbor proximum tomb without gaining the slightest piece of news on what happened to anything far away the end of time is not the final Globe but on un Circle all the other Globes the final meaning to all it all rather it's a new difference a new line traced inside all the other line Crossing them everywhere and giving and another meaning to every event that is an end a goal a final and radical presence and achievement not another world but this same world grasped in a radically new way many are those appeals to conversion the kingdom of the god is near come in the house of a father the world has become flesh and so on in a bewildering flourish of expression that gain their meaning only if they are able to convert on the spot in real time one after the other those who hear them or that lose any meaning if they fail to convert a way of talking which is just as exacting just as a tune to the difference between truth and falsity than that of the Sciences but that direct attention in the opposite direction to the close at hand not to the distance this was the reason why by the way I claim in the lecture two the resemblance between what I call religion two and nature two tragically this twist in the flow of time this event inside the event this es scatter Lodge inside the movement of History has been transmogrified into an escape from time a jump to Eternity as if a Calamity of the natural was not enough generation of priests pastors preachers and theologian have belabored the Holy scriptures to prop up on top of nature another domain of a supernatural as if a non-existence of nature could serve as a solid foundation for the non-existence of a supernatural the Hall of religion has been progressively displaced to an attempt to save the disembodied Souls of human from an sinful attachment to the earth look above even more tragically a misunderstanding and ensued about what was called paganism pagans even though they had totally ignored the very notion of nature were taken as those who were too close to Nature to hear the call of a transcended god even though the Transcendent of his God of incarnation had to be inserted into the very immanence of passing time at the epoch of the anthropos scene there are still Christian who keep hesitating to embrace ecological causes for fear of falling into paganism and pantheism it is in large part the belief that a combat against paganism has to be mercifully pursued that has led Christianity astray forcing the sh the faithful to shun the path of the Sciences just when those were showing the way on this Earth much more clearly than the column of smoke leading the Hebrews through the desert to be sure the belief in the creation as an alternative to Nature is a powerful way to make certain that the converting power of incarnation is not limited to the inner fa of a psyche and that it may extend finally to the whole Cosmos but only only on the condition that creation is not another name for nature distinguished from it only as we saw in the second lecture from the presence of other animated agencies and package by Design the Holy Spirit May renew the face of Earth but he is paress when confronted with faceless nature it's because Gia is such a secular figure that it may allow the dynamic of incarnation to Res assume its movement in a space freed from the limits of nature if we really as SLE said know that the whole creation groans and travails in the pain of child birth until now it means that it's not yet achieve and thus it has to be composed step by step Soul by Soul agency by agency how strange it is that thean fighting against paganism don't realize that they are the one who have built over Century a real Cult of nature that is a search for an outside immutable Universal undisputable entity in contrast with the mutable local and Tangled and disputable narrative which the rest of us Earthbound inhabit we might have forgotten that another rendition of the word ecology to use yogan man invented etimology could be oos logos that is the house of the logos this house of the father of which the gospel of St John writes that it has many mention I hope you have understood that to occupy the earth no to be occupied and preoccupied by the Earth we need to inhabit all those manions at once you see that there exist at least fourway each of them giving sense to the maxim plus intra to make those planetary boundary not what is imposed from the outside by nature but something inside which the Earth bound themselves decide to remain circumscribed I have now completed the movement that I wanted to share with you this strange trajectory that has forced us to take up against this old task of doing the political Theology of a non-existing people a people that I have invented by imagining that its member could be freed from all of her attachment lands and missions out of Egypt all over again I'm well aware aware that political theology is not a quite and cheery field is it's too dark too dangerous and also it's written by abominably reactionary people it just that by proposing the golden spike of the anthropocene by throwing the earth and its inhabitant into the same historicity naturalists have pushed the whole of our thought into a tail spin our entire entire operating system has to be Rewritten what I've done is to bring together science politics religion after having extracted each of them from its confusion with nature strangely enough nature is much too restricted the globe for the geostory that those free field wish to tell actually the first thing I did on arriving in elra was to pay a visit to the Outlook to with which I started this meditation Monday before last I was deeply disappointed that Patrick GES could pretend to accommodate the whole known Cosmos inside those few shabby rooms seem as bizarre as though medieval t- maps with Jerusalem at the center that preceded the shape of the many new lands brought back by Navigators how could you squeeze the universe in this small space in my disappointment I saw Vivid confirmation of the argument that because she has she has the shape of a globe nature in spite of her immensity is too small to hold the discovery of the earth too completed already too circular too narrow-minded to absorb the Stupify historicity of a planet this is why geography is to be Rewritten in that sense we find ourself exactly in an age similar to that of Columbus when his voyage encountered an all new continent that the cirular view of the Mediterranean people could not have anticipated to absorb a new subversion in the shape of the earth we are exactly as ill prepared as Medieval Europe was except by this time it's not the extension and expansion of a new piece of land that is revealed by the agency and intensity of the whole earth it's not a revelation about the special but about the historical extansion of the planet humans are not stupified to learn that there is an entire new world at their disposal but that they have to entirely relearn the way in which they inhabit their Same Old World this is why so many way we feel transported back into the climate of the 16th century and another age of Discovery and of course I'm sure that historian will say that Humanity has been there many time and that the tendency to exaggerate the novelty of the period is as old as the apocalypse itself but what I did in those lectures was to take seriously the possibility that the anthropocene was indeed a radically new situation it is in Gaia after all that we might discover the FL five planets if you remember five Planet calculated with the global actors method which are necessary for our progress and development that is inside the planetary boundaries themselves folded in their multiple world and because we will learn to maintain our activity in that same safe operating space this is where the Transcendence of religion lies deep in The Recess of human Incarnation that is where the sciences and Technology reside deep within the many untangled narratives of all the event of all the agency in all the Twist and folds of its natural history this is where the resources of politics Li deep within the indignation and the Revolt of those who scream at seeing their soil disappear from under their feet what the maxim plus intra designate is a path for progress and for invention a path that links the natural history of the planet with the H story of the Incarnation and with the Revolt of those who are going to learn never to accept remaining quiet simply because they have to oby the laws of nature it is still the old and proud injunction forward forward not toward a new land but toward a land whose face is to be renewed if Columbus took very earnestly his surname of Christopher carrying Jesus AC across the Atlantic we can no longer believe that we have the shoulders strong enough to carry such a weight rather we should agree to weigh much less heavily on the back of what is taking us through the F of time namely Gaia for me not to have been instantly crushed by the burden of the topic and The Prestige of a long line of my predecessors in this lecture ser is all I could wish for thank you very [Applause] much it is usually the custom that there is no time for question or discussion after the final lecture but Professor lur has insisted uh that we allow some time and we're happy to oblige uh and so if your stamina can hold up for this final time we will have about uh uh 10 or 15 minutes perhaps of question and discussion so the floor is now open and uh Lynn if you are there with the roving mic so please if you wish to have a a question or comment raise your hand and Lynn will pass it to you but before we do that can I give you just um those of you have to get away to about two minutes to make your move and then we will have the questions what I think is a a simple question for you and thank you for your your six days of talk this has been amazing um I think it was Tuesday you said that the anthropos scine will put an end to anthropomorphism can you just uh talk a little bit more about that well because it I mean on the face of it it's an extension of the weight of a human which is another I mean obviously this is what it is except of course the anthropos which is supposed to be confronted with nature in the old definition I say it's not NE it's G uh doesn't have a political body so it actually the moth in anthropomorphism the morphism it's morphed into a very very different set of question which which are open for political Theory and in my view political theology as well which is how many ways there are to be confronted with the anthropos I mean obviously it's not neither you or me it's not nation state even though nation state have a responsibility it's activist but it's different things because it's us attached to our territories which is a very o odd definition of what it is to be a human an Earthbound is some some someone relatively different from a human in many definition of human as extra extracting oneself from the necessity of nature for that figure of what it is to be human is completely obsolete with the anthropo so in that sense it's not just the face of human which would be recognizable sort of Superman facing nature it but it also redistribute as much what nature was used to be so the anthropos works on the two set the human and also nature sure ni has no question this is R I miss you on Tuesday thank you again um I was trying to think of which of the many gifts from classical Christian theology might be most appropriate to present in this very dark vision which you presented and I wondered whether one of them I wonder what you thought about it might be the Curious relation of Sudden Change and incremental development or incremental change that is present in the very strange holding together in classical theology between baptism which is done once and which changes everything suddenly a whole reorientation towards a different good but also a turning away from a very specifically named deed evil so it has that kind of dual function which is Then followed by a lifetime of incremental change and transformation um you you don't you don't need to be baptized every week um but there does need to be a kind of of movement towards a different future and it seemed that one of the things that you were grappling with is a simultaneous need for a sudden shift of vision uh an alternative form of of of the generation of a collective but also then this constant incremental need for transformation that follows it but what follows rather strangely from your presentation is that the tempo or the pace of this incremental change a lifetime is no longer enough um it's it's not possible to baptize an infant and then give them many years of incremental change towards this new future we have to baptize everybody as fast as possible and then the pace of that incremental change needs to be stepped up in a way hitherto never dreamed of thank you composition is of course one of the way to handle the one of his defin many different limit one of them is the conversion obviously the fourth of his living in the end of time it's connected to this argument about hope with cve Hamilton has developed even though it's not clearly theological argument and hope is the wrong way to try to handle this question you have to lose it before you can so that's a sort of sudden um ways and then there is a composition one way of phrasing that which is of course linked to the argument in political theology is this argument of a catacon I mean that where the suspension so the thing is done we are done for but then it's suspended which is another way of playing with with this now of all these metaphors of Rhythm conversion movement is there extraordinary features that is inverted but it's about former object of nature that speed is now speed quick transformation NE positive feedback and so on is now attributed to former natures and the humans are now portrayed as the one who are unable of conversion so to speak which is a very odd for all sort of metaphors of the history of human on earth completely bizarre I think we have exhausted the one here why was it dark by the way Tuesday was dark but today was supposed to be we have lost hope now Esperance come I mean English I realize is a bad language because you don't have a difference between hope es and Esperance yes how would you say it English what's the difference between hope and ESP ah there's two two uses of the word hope I mean in in in popular usage we say I hope it doesn't rain today but it means I have no idea whether it will or not or whatever but the biblical notion of Hope El is uh something that is guaranteed it's just not here yet okay so you strive in the confidence that it's out there it's just not here yet I realize that in theology the French have advantages because true we have hope es and we have also and you are stuck to neighbor which is not so good that was there was a comment here yeah it's it's the same question that uh I had asked you after the first lecture which was I I think in some way to what extent this this project is Western Centric and to what extent it can be proposed to people that might not have this idea of science either of the two meanings of Science and either of the two meanings of of religion and given the scope of the project it's probably something that makes sense to say something about maybe no you I'm sorry I didn't I wanted to when the first idea of the lectures came I was wanted to do a much more uh foral review of the anthropology literature and I got stuck into the natural uh political theology which you're right I mean is is is very highly circumscribed set of of of ways of arguing about people and Cosmos and so on so there would be if I had had the six other lectures of the old Gord format uh I would have developed much more the other part which is of course the Des scholar Vio decastro the whole work in Gold uh which are many other ways of occupying this space and even talking about what is the people and an entity and a cosmos than I did so I'm sorry to say that I didn't make much progress between the first question that you rais after the first lectures and this one and I'm still uh uh guilty of the same uh limits it seemed to me that the extraction of a notion of nature from science religion I mean Christian religion and politics was already quite a large call but you're perfectly right mic mic yes I'd like to to ask your VI on on simply put um the Paradigm of science is basically one of control I'm a scientist myself so I'm very familiar with the mechanistic language that we use in science and and if anything you know science mechanistic language tends to to take apart for nor and if anything I would say it it's aimed at desensitization and so a few of lectures ago when you were talking about the importance and the need of sensitization and resensitization and creating Loops of sensitization to Gaia my question is whether you you don't think that there might be in fact you know a large inner logical tension between the way Western science works and what you're aiming for well where Western science work according to us with science studies people is nature to which mean your work which called mechanization is actually an the best way to animate the agencies which are part of former nature so paradoxically my view mean this is a diplomatic encounter which always has to be done with great care but uh there is of course a Dean animated style of talking about science which is often Dawn but in for fight fighting reason most of the time but the as I showed in the first two lectures the the the agencies the notion of agencies and the multiplicity of agencies is precisely what we learn from science and actually every single little twist and tools in in Gaia I mean in natural history is come from scientist I mean if you read Maris if you read any uh and love loock of course but all the Earth scientist I mean Stefan and all these guys there is nothing especially mechanistic even though when even when they describe mechanic the mechanics of GA so in mechanistic there is a a sort of misunderstanding there's one there's a way of writing which Dean animate the series of causes and consequences but that's a purely ideological V vision of what the and then there is a practice and the practice of science is to be passionate about extremely active agencies which is a great Paradox that's why I made the two columns there's no relation between science one and science two so you said yourself I speak in a mechanistic tone but I'm sure if I had the pleasure of reading your paper I would show I mean proliferation of agencies in all places plus the nice fact that you don't necessarily immediately convince your colleagues So to that is added the nice controversies about it and my own field is is that of animal sentience and Welfare my experience is that you know a lot of scientists there are are very keen to to take that apart into and and reassemble it as you you made you in in the brain in terms of Neuroscience whereas I you know they they don't they forget to honor the whole animal and the agency of the whole animal who owns actually or that who's the owner of that sentience and I find in my own work that having to to fight for that wholeness of the animal within science is very very difficult yes no of course it is very difficult because they they are divided it's exactly as in theology they are divided this is why these two columns which might have seen a bit AER at the beginning of the talk were so important for me because they are really divided and we we we we use the word nature for two completely different views and we use the word religion for two absolutely complete complet my my idea is to make the connection between the two it's a risky move of course but Michael over here thank you again for very stimulating lecture and particularly the emphasis on Gaia as real estate or radical estate and this uh really Schmid derived idea then that the boundaries of our new anthropocenic citizenship are the boundaries of the Earth the bound boundaries of the whole planet but what I would like to press you on a little more is is the political implications of this you spoke of the moments and the lines of decision but certainly some in the audience and many in the climate activist movement many climate scientists most politicians would say oh yes but we know what you're talking about it's called the United Nations we set up the United Nations framework convention on climate change with a recognition that some are suffering some have more responsibility than others and I suppose I really just would like you to reflect a little bit on that process even if you simply to say well it's it's founded on a series of conceptual errors or or whatever but it does seem to me that at least we we we need to to at least acknowledge it and say well yeah it's not working but for these reasons What would would a more effective Council look like than the unfccc perhaps is another way to ask the question well of course I I cannot do what I did so far which is to say it will be in the next lecture because there's no next lecture uh but I I'm going to say yes you're right it would be extremely important uh and I we have actually done several of this experiment by redoing the copag mess up of 2009 trying to find other boundary playing the scientists in different position so there's a whole work of let's say practical parliamentary representativity politics to be uh done what I added I think in into this reflection which are very interesting and I contributed with some of my colleagues is uh the diffic the fact of being able to represent the power The Sovereign power which has radical title not as the return of nature to which we would bow but as something a key to the leviathon that is to which we recognize when when we talk about Gaya and we give it a personal name it's no more bizarre than when we say Scotland without any idea that Scotland is actually somewhere in in the palace down the mile there as as a globe I mean the queen is you know it's not big soorry she's not a globe so the the the the the association so it's an experiment into metaphors about what it is to take absolutely seriously the argument about the Earth Mother of law not the mother in law that is a misunder understand again the mother of Law and so I agree on tely there's a whole range of work to be done in political science really but here I that's a political theology argument which I wanted to bring in which is we are not under we are not summoned by Nature because no one will change their ways of life or will be converted as Nick said just because n demand it but now to share power with something which has sovereignty radical title and which is responsive and tickling that's maybe a different matter I think we'll have to I think we'll have to conclude there um the drinks await uh but uh it is my happy honor to be able to say just a few words of appreciation for your lectures in the six lectures of the series facing Gaia Professor lur you have informed stimulated and likely even provoked us variously reflecting an impressively wide acquaintance with scholarly work in a number of fields a clear focus and a passionate concern to alert and even to Galvanize us toward action you have pointedly dismantled simplistic and romantic Notions of a capital N nature and an equally simplistic Notions of a capital S science cogently contending that both comprise complex and even conflicting Dynamics in particular against Notions of nature capital n as superal ordered Timeless and maternal or as all powerful and overwhelmingly Sublime you have emphasized instead an earth that is comprised of various forces and agencies an earth that both nourishes and is itself shaped by the various species on it and is even fragile and susceptible to sudden and momentous changes early in this lecture series you also contrasted useless versions of religion that seem unable to engage the world here below meaningfully and for which God is little more than a cosmic designer or lawgiver and you urged instead a religiousness that is able to perceive and act in the light of the Divine and investment in this world that is expressed in the biblical representation of God as both Creator and incarnate Redeemer I was struck also by your emphasis that the combined effects of scientific investigation actually underscores The Singularity of Earth not simply as one planet among others at least as far as the human race is concerned but in all practical terms that is in terms of human existence our soul habitation unique in its fecundity but also finite and not to be taken for granted though perhaps less explicitly emphasized in your lectures a clear corollary that emerged is the uniqueness of the human species as the Gathering data of environmental Sciences show we are in fact uniquely disproportionately able to affect the Earth for good or for ill and at the cost of other species and if we do not take care perhaps even at the cost of our own continued existence but that also means that we should recognize a unique responsibility toward the Earth as a Biblical scholar I have to say I note that both of these emphases resonate with Biblical texts and although in some forms of modernity both ideas have for some time been unfashionable I find it interesting that they seem to come to us with new and Powerful cogency in the light of the scientific work that you have mentioned the biblical image of the human species the ad the Earth man or the Earth creature given the responsibility to tend the Earth and keep it has often seemed quaint but today may not be so wide of the mark after all but in addition to Leading us in a major rethinking of Notions of nature religion and science you have summoned us to political action even urging us to think of ourselves as at War and likening the stakes to the fearful Prospect of total nuclear destruction that loomed over previous decades sometimes striking a a tone more Evangelical than discursive you have underscored the urgency and the immensity of the actions needed calling for commitment decision and also for wisdom in our actions well the consistently High attendance levels across the six lectures the animation evident in the questions and discussion and the transgenerational makeup of the audience combined to testify to the interest in your topic and to your success in leading us even prodding us to engage this topic thoughtfully and with moral seriousness I want to invite the audience now to join me in a final expression of our appreciation for your lectures this production is brought to you by the UN University of Edinburgh

Channel: The University of Edinburgh

Views: 9,386

Keywords: bruno, latour, gifford, lecture, gaia, university, edinburgh, Bruno Latour (Sociologist), university of edinburgh, religion

Id: 5xojsnUtXHQ

Length: 75min 56sec (4556 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 04 2013