Down to Earth by Bruno Latour

Author:Bruno Latour
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781509530564
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2018-10-16T00:00:00+00:00

14.

If amalgamating – as in the context of wars of revolution – the old veterans of the class struggle and the new recruits to the geo-social conflicts has not been possible, the fault lies in the role that both groups have attributed to “nature.” Here is one of those cases in which, literally, ideas lead the world.

A certain conception of “nature” has allowed the Moderns to occupy the Earth in such a way that it forbids others to occupy their own territories differently. For, in order to mold a politics, you need agents who bring together their interests and their capacities for action. But you cannot make alliances between political actors and objects that are external to society and deprived of the power to act. This dilemma is very well expressed by the French Zadists when they write: “We are not defending nature, we are nature defending itself.”60

For the exteriority attributed to objects is not a given encountered through experience, but the result of a quite particular political-scientific history that we need to examine briefly in order to restore more leeway to politics.

It is obvious that the question of the sciences is central if we are to survey the Terrestrial. Without the sciences, what would we know of the New Climatic Regime? And how could we forget that sciences have become the privileged target of the climate change deniers?

But we still need to know how to grasp them. If we swallow the usual epistemology whole, we shall find ourselves again prisoners of a conception of “nature” that is impossible to politicize since it has been invented precisely to limit human action thanks to an appeal to the laws of objective nature that cannot be questioned. Freedom on one side, strict necessity on the other: this makes it possible to have it both ways.61 Every time we want to count on the power to act of other actors, we’re going to encounter the same objection: “Don’t even think about it, these are mere objects, they cannot react,” the way Descartes said of animals that they cannot suffer.

However, if we claim to be opposing “scientific rationality” by inventing a more intimate, more subjective, more rooted, more global – more “ecological,” as it were – way of capturing our ties to “nature,” we lose on both fronts: we will be left with the idea of “nature” borrowed from tradition while being deprived of the contribution of positive knowledge.

We need to be able to count on the full power of the sciences, but without the ideology of “nature” that has been attached to that power. We have to be materialist and rational, but we have to shift these qualities onto the right grounds.

The difficulty is that the Terrestrial is not at all the Globe. One cannot be materialist and rational in the same way in these two sites.

In the first place, it is clear that one cannot praise rationality without recognizing to what extent it has been abused by the quest for the Global.

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