"[T]ouching down on Planet Latour"—Nigel Clark's response to my "Back down to Earth"

As regular readers will surely be aware, I recently published an article with the wonderful journal Global Discourse titled "Back down to Earth: reassembling Latour's Anthropocenic geopolitics" (it's currently available online; it'll appear in print in the near future). This journal has a policy, unusual in the social sciences, of commissioning short replies to each article published.

I have been fortunate enough to receive two such responses, the first by Simon Dalby ("Taking Gaia seriously in Bruno Latour’s Geopolitics") and now a second by Nigel Clark ("Metamorphoses: on Philip Conway’s geopolitical Latour").

(If you'd like a copy of any of either of the replies or my original article and don't have institutional access, just get in touch via email and I'd be happy to oblige.)

Nigel has been a sympathetic critic of Latour's works for some time and I make reference to several of his works in my article. He most generously writes that:

"Reading […] ‘Back down to Earth’ I feel like I am touching down on Planet Latour afresh and discovering that it has been wildly terraforming itself while I’d popped out."

I am very glad that my work has made this impression. It was a large part of my intention with this article to demonstrate and articulate some of the richness evident in Latour's later works—a wealth that numerous people have confessed to me, Nigel included, that it is difficult to keep up with (it is worth mentioning at this point that Latour's Gifford Lectures, which a large part of my article was based on, are to be almost completely rewritten and expanded for publication)! Modesty dissuades me from quoting his comment that Back down to Earth is "the single most illuminating text on Latour’s work that I have ever encountered," however vanity evidently gets the better of that instinct on this occasion. Kind words!

Nigel, however, remains unsatisfied with aspects of Latour's work. Does the figure of Gaia really do enough to absorb into thought not only the non-human but also the inhuman in the world?

"Raised in the Pacific Ring of Fire, living on islands shaped and reshaped by ongoing crustal collisions and episodic volcanic activity, and intrigued by the way biological life rafted across the Earth’s surface on mobile tectonic plate fragments, I hungered after accounts of agency that put the incontrovertibly inhuman machinations of the Earth high on the agenda. All that talk of laboratories, of world-shaping events migrating outwards from European research centres, the endless reference to the co-constitution of humans and non-humans, never did quite enough decentring of the human for me. I wanted to ask not only how do scientists give rise to worlds, but how does the Earth give rise (maybe, maybe not) to a scientist?"

The most provocative point that Nigel makes, for me, concerns the conceptualisation of strata (after Deleuze & Guattari but also Elizabeth Grosz) as geopolitical or geo-ontological conditions of possibility and as radical wells of potentiality. He urges that we think:

"[…] through ‘strata’ – by which I mean not simply the layering of the lithosphere but the more general way in which earlier physic-material events lay down the conditions of possibility for what may later come to pass. Or what we might call subtending relations. […] it is this positing of an antecedent or underlying region of potentiality that is for me the real revelation."

This links interestingly with another of my present projects on matters of determinism and possibilism in geopolitics (materialising at the RGS-IBG conference this year, which, incidentally, Simon Dalby is involved with and, I hope, Nigel will be able to participate in also).

My initial reaction would be that I would resist focusing too much on this sense of profound, boundless 'potentialities' in the abstract (while not at all denying the near-unfathomability of such depths) and instead try to follow the trajectories by and through which potentialities are turned into determinations. This historical and sociological task seems, to me, to be one that resonates well with the Latourian corpus and links, indeed, with his recent encounter (or might I say collision) with the 'politics of possibility' of the Breakthrough Institute and their 'ecomodernism.'

One last critical question that Nigel raises is, I think, fair and important.

"Finally, how far do we want to extend the notion of ‘political power’? Is politics not also, sooner or later, about giving reasons: the justification of our actions to others – which would seem to be a vital part of the appeal to strangers implied by the notion of convening publics? Do we want to see Gaia and all Gaians as literally ‘geopolitic’ – as Conway reads Latour? Or might we wish to draw a sharper distinction between that which triggers or energizes the political, and that which a particular kind of negotiating, desiring and reasoning being actually makes of this excitation?"

The part of my essay that he is referring is close to the culmination of my narrative; I write:

"Human politics explicates, amplifies and formalises what was already happening – non-human Gaians already format their spheres, adore their attachments, adapt their environments, measure their means, cultivate their cultures and nurture their natures. Each in their own ways, at wildly varying intensities, through spiralling, sinuous movements that ensnare, ensphere, entwine and envelop, all Gaians ‘geopolitic.’"

The 'scare quotes' here are carefully placed. In earlier drafts I had written "all Gaians, in a sense, 'geopolitic'," to doubly emphasise the hesitancy I have in making this leap into suggesting that all Gaia's constituents are 'geopolitical.'

Last week I read Brian Massumi's recent essay What Animals Teach Us about Politics. My criticism of Massumi's argument is that, in order to affirm that there is no total, radical, transcendent break between animality and humanity but rather a continuation, amplification and transformation of certain mutually shared capacities, he makes pretty much anything that any living being does into 'politics.' So, when two wolf cubs are play-fighting, this demonstrating sophisticated and complex kinds of inter-personal relations, this is said to be a kind of animal 'politics.' I find that this is the wrong option. It would be better to argue that politics derives from capacities and practices that are part of a common ecology but that are not reducible to the same elements of that heterogeneous web—a pluralising, particularising, historicising gesture.

In other words, my 'scare quotes' indicate my hesitancy on this point and, in hindsight, I agree with Nigel. However, the really important part is, as I've mentioned, the affirmation that politics is not something imposed upon a reality with which it has little or nothing in common but a creative rupture—a metamorphosis, indeed—that derives from a plural reality that has many kinds of tangled relations of kinship and inheritance.

So, all in all, I can only express my gratitude to Simon and Nigel for their generous responses, and to Global Discourse for having such an excellent policy in this regard! Long may it continue and far may it be imitated.

Be careful who you dance with; or, The dangers of modernist post-naturalism; or, The discordant choreographies of the Anthropocene

For some commentators, the advent of the Anthropocene as a geohistorically timely concept has been a cause for celebration in at least one respect: it has thumped the final nail into the coffin of 'Nature' qua absolute, immutable outside. This post argues at possibly interminable length what can also be stated simply and with pith:

Those dancing on the grave of Nature should be careful who they dance with.

Because there are those for whom Nature's demise signals the coming of nothing less than a new White Man's Burden—this time it is the burden of Humans tending a prostrate, pathetic, infantilised and mostly lower-case nature. As though perturbation implied control.

Take this from Erle Ellis, an environmental scientist writing in Wired magazine in 2009:

You are living on a used planet. 

If this bothers you, get over it. We now live in the Anthropocene ― a geological epoch in which Earth’s atmosphere, lithosphere and biosphere are shaped primarily by human forces. 

Yes, nature is still around ― back-seat driving, annoying us with natural disasters from time to time, and everywhere present in the background ― but definitely in no position to take the wheel. That’s our job now. Don’t blame nature for global warming, sea level rise, invasive species, mass extinctions, crop failures and poverty. That’s our thing.

Or these excerpts from Ellis' article in New Scientist magazine in 2011:

[…] it's high time that we – and I do mean all of us – take stock of the new Earth we have created. 

Earth’s biodiversity, biogeochemistry and evolution are now profoundly reshaped by us – and are therefore in our hands. 

It is no longer Mother Nature who will care for us, but us who must care for her. 

[…] can we create a good Anthropocene? In the distant future will we be able to look back with pride? […] We most certainly can […] In the Anthropocene we are the creators, engineers and permanent global stewards of a sustainable human nature.

Or these snippets from Mark Lynas, a British journalist and consultant to the President of Mauritius; for Lynas human beings are now nothing less than The God Species (2011):

On a planetary scale, humans now assert unchallenged dominion over all living things. 

[…] playing God (in the sense of being intelligent designers) at a planetary level is essential if creation is not to be irreparably damaged or even destroyed by humans unwittingly deploying our newfound powers in disastrous ways. At this late stage, false humility is a more urgent danger than hubris. The truth of the Anthropocene is that the Earth is far out of balance, and we must help it regain the stability it needs to function as a self-regulating, highly dynamic, and complex system. It cannot do so alone. 

[…] the first responsibility of a conquering army is always to govern. 

In reality we can build our way out of climate change […] 

[…] simply knowing what we are doing means that none of our actions in the future that affect the climate can be called unwitting. Our hands are on the thermostat whether we like it or not, so sooner or later we are going to have to face up to the need to make a decision about what temperature we want our planet to be at over the longer term. 

Finally, this introductory remark from Emma Marris' book Rambunctious Garden (2011):

We are already running the whole Earth, whether we admit it or not. To run it consciously and effectively, we must admit our role and even embrace it. We must temper our romantic notion of untrammelled wilderness and find room next to it for the more nuanced notion of a global, half-wild rambunctious garden, tended by us. (p.2)

It is not at all difficult to hear the unabashed reclamation of the modernist telos in these claims, as well-intentioned and agreeable as each of the above authors may otherwise be. This is a problem. We are not, in the above, so very far away from the high modernist idealism of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin in his book Building the Earth [Construire La Terre] (1958):

[…] mankind is not an accidental phenomenon occurring by chance on one of the smallest stars in the sky. Mankind represents the culmination of the whole movement of matter and life, so far as it is within the range of our experience. 

[…] real unity, to the extent to which all the world is finally at one in recognising that the function of man is to build and direct the whole of the Earth.

In us the evolution of the World towards the spirit becomes conscious. 

Intellectually, the progress of science is proceeding to construct a synthesis of the laws of Matter and Life, which, fundamentally, is nothing else but a collective act of perception; the World seen in the same coherent perspective by the whole of Mankind. The future of the Earth is in our hands. How shall we decide?

Nor is it so different from the thoughts of the Russian geochemist and philosopher Vladimir Vernadsky, writing just after the Second World War:

If man understands [that the strength of mankind is derived from its brain] an immense future is open before him in the geological history of the biosphere. […] we may face the future with confidence. It is in our hands. 

We are entering this new spontaneous process at a terrible time, at the end of a destructive world war. But the important thing for us is the fact that the ideals of our democracy correspond to a spontaneous geological process, to natural laws – the noösphere. So we can look at the future with confidence.

The neo-noöspheric pretensions of the modernist Anthropocene celebrators are widely evidenced. If the above references are a little obscure then take this from Daniel Dennett's book Freedom Evolves (2003):

We are outnumbered on this planet [by other species] but though we are in the minority, our capacity for long-distance knowledge gives us powers that dwarf the powers of all the rest of the life on the planet. Now, for the first time in its billions of years of history, our planet is protected by far-seeing sentinels, able to anticipate danger from the distant future–a comet on a collision course, or global warming–and devise schemes for doing something about it. The planet has finally grown its own nervous system: us.

The final sentence of that paragraph is taken as the epigraph to James Lovelock's most recent book A Rough Ride to the Future (2014), a book that I've written about on this blog previously.

Evidently, dancing on the grave of Nature qua absolute, immutable outside in no way necessitates the abandonment of modernist onto-imperialism, nor human exceptionalism, nor anything of the sort.

Now, don't get me wrong, it's not that I'm not dancing too, it's just that I'm finding myself more and more wary of those that I'm dancing with.

No one has made more of a cause célèbre of the Anthropocene than Bruno Latour; he has literally monumentalised it. This short essay written for The Breakthrough Institute (2011) chimes fully and loudly with the above:

France, for its part, has never believed in the notion of a pristine Nature that has so confused the "defense of the environment" in other countries. What we call a "national park" is a rural ecosystem complete with post offices, well-tended roads, highly subsidized cows, and handsome villages. 

Those who wish to protect natural ecosystems learn, to their stupefaction, that they have to work harder and harder—that is, to intervene even more, at always greater levels of detail, with ever more subtle care—to keep them "natural enough" for Nature-intoxicated tourists to remain happy. 

Like France's parks, all of Nature needs our constant care, our undivided attention, our costly instruments, our hundreds of thousands of scientists, our huge institutions, our careful funding. But though we have Nature, and we have nurture, we don't know what it would mean for Nature itself to be nurtured.

Nigel Clark has criticised Latour's work for hewing too close to an excessive constructivism in his book Inhuman Nature. However, the obvious resonances of this extract with the foregoing should not be taken altogether out of context; particularly, Latour's more recent work supplements his constructivism. The crucial importance of Gaia for Latour (and, in fairness, for Lovelock) is precisely that she is utterly beyond our ken and unquestionably outside of our control, even if she is essentially immanent to our atmo-chemically effluent perturbations. It is Gaia that wreaks revenge, not us; we are little more than 'tics on her mane.' There is no possibility of mastery here.

This is the crucial difference: It is not enough to simply celebrate the end of 'Nature'—one must also recognise that its successor, Gaia, is more not less fearsome.

There's a saying, supposedly Inuit, that appears on motivational posters and in books of popular quotations: When you're walking on thin ice you might as well dance. Are we dancing because we are fully cognisant that the ice might crack at any moment or because we are so very excited see such a great and glorious future laid out before us? Nothing could be more crucial than this difference.

Are these the last days of Rome or the first?—Our entire Anthropocene choreography pivots on this crucial geopolitical distinction. Entirely different terrestrial ensembles will result from the following through of these distinct plans of movement. They are worlds apart.

It's a ghoulish thought, dancing on the fragilely interred. Might we yet plunge into Nature's icy grave? Might we follow the path of Nature after all; that is, out of existence? I, for one, am disinclined to link arms with anyone who fails to see this as all too real of a possibility.

Clive Hamilton on the 'new environmentalists' and the 'good Anthropocene'; the rough edges of political aesthetics

An important article by Clive Hamilton on the 'new environmentalists' and the so-called 'good Anthropocene':

[...] almost as soon as the idea of the Anthropocene took hold, people began revising its meaning and distorting its implications. A new breed of ecopragmatists welcomed the new epoch as an opportunity. They gathered around the Breakthrough Institute, a “neogreen” think tank founded by Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, the authors of a controversial 2004 paper, “The Death of Environmentalism.” They do not deny global warming; instead they skate over the top of it, insisting that whatever limits and tipping points the Earth system might throw up, human technology and ingenuity will transcend them. 

As carbon dioxide concentrations pass 400 ppm for the first time in a million years, and scientists warn of a United States baking in furnace-like summers by the 2070s, Shellenberger and Nordhaus write that by the end of the century “nearly all of us will be prosperous enough to live healthy, free, and creative lives.” The answer, they say, is not to change course but to more tightly “embrace human power, technology, and the larger process of modernization.” 

The argument absolves us all of the need to change our ways, which is music to the ears of political conservatives. The Anthropocene is system-compatible.

[...] 

In the words of the most vocal eco-pragmatist, the environmental scientist Erle Ellis, “We will be proud of the planet we create.” Ellis speaks of “the good Anthropocene,” a golden era in which we relinquish nostalgic attachments to a nature untouched by humans and embrace the new epoch as “ripe with human-directed opportunity.”

By the final quoted paragraph in particular I am reminded of Nigel Clark's thesis in Inhuman Nature (and other writings) where he holds constructivism (particularly of the Latourian variety) as being effectively complicit with the over-statement of human agency in the face of overwhelmingly inhuman forces. I don't agree with parts of his analysis; however, the above clearly demonstrates his wider and more important point: that we must reckon with our finitude -- and fast.

In another article on the same themes posted only a few days ago Hamilton writes:

In the end, grasping at delusions like “the good Anthropocene” is a failure of courage, courage to face the facts. The power of positive thinking can’t turn malignant tumours into benign growths, and it can’t turn planetary overreach into endless lifestyle improvements. Declaring oneself to be an optimist is often used as a means of gaining the moral upper hand: “Things may look bad but, O ye of little faith, be bold and cheerful like me.”

There is a point at which optimism starts to become pathological; I think this the point where it is taken to be an end in itself. In a society with a fully-developed pathology one can win an argument simply by being optimistic; one can, with a snide chuckle, merely brush off inconvenient questions simply because they are uncomfortable. One's cognitive comfort (and that of the well-heeled choir to which one preaches) comes first and prevails over and above all dissuasive shrieks and cries. Those who suffer must not only suffer but also do so quietly.

I must say that excessive optimism is not a condition not something that we Brits are overburdened with in general.



However, that does not mean that we are not similarly insensitive. Most of us would sooner starve half the world than give up our cars or our South African asparagus (though we would never admit this, least of all to ourselves).

I don't suppose that any of the 'eco-pragmatists' would agree with a word of what I am polemically attributing to them; however, this really does seem to be the unavoidable conclusion of their line of thinking -- how else will they sustain their fantasy if not by exporting disconfirmatory externalities into the bodies and atmospheres of others?

The incapacity to cognise discomforting information as anything other than a falsehood (false because it is discomforting) leads inexorably to chronic insensitivity.

If we're not afraid then we really haven't been paying attention.

Political aesthetics must have rough edges.