immanence

Review of Bruno Latour, Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime, Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2018.

Down to Earth is in significant part a restatement of Bruno Latour’s theorizing over the last few decades, made more incisive in the light of Trumpism (and other illiberal populisms) and brought to bear specifically on the moment of Trump’s rejection of the Paris Climate Agreement. Latour assesses this rejection as a clarifying moment in what we are up against:

The hypothesis is that we can understand nothing about the politics of the last 50 years if we do not put the question of climate change and its denial front and center. Without the idea that we have entered into a New Climatic Regime, we cannot understand the explosion of inequalities, the scope of deregulation, the critique of globalization, or, most importantly, the panicky desire to return to the old protections of the nation-state—a desire that is identified, quite inaccurately, with the “rise of populism.”

He takes all of these to be ”part of a single phenomenon: the elites have been so thoroughly convinced that there would be no future life for everyone that they have decided to get rid of all the burdens of solidarity as fast as possible,” to build a “gilded fortress,” and to “conceal the crass selfishness of such a flight out of the shared world” by categorically denying the threat at its origin — that of climate change. In the place of this disastrous and inhuman political maneuver, Latour advocates that we “come down to earth” and “land somewhere,” regaining our bearings within a new map of positions within which both ”the affects of public life” and “its stakes” can be redefined.

In other words, Latour is applying his decades-in-the-making conceptual apparatus — the critique of modernization first articulated in We Have Never Been Modern (1991) and ultimately developed into the massive An Inquiry Into Modes of Existence (2013) project, and the painstaking attention to the details by which networks and alliances are built and rebuilt (as developed within actor-network theory) — to understanding the current global eco-political situation.

The upshot of the effort is a fairly simple, and perhaps oversimplified, formula: against the twin “attractors” of the “Global” and the “Local” — the first understood as the end point of the now largely discredited and abandoned project of modernization, the second as the fall-back to which globalism’s critics are retreating — Latour proposes a third and novel attractor, which he labels the “Terrestrial.” He has elsewhere used the image of Gaia (or “Gaia 2.0”), reconfigured with some philosophical rigor from out of the writings of James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis, to describe how we might think of this “new political actor,” but here he sidesteps that debate. (There is a fourth attractor, too — the “Out-of-this-World” of trans-humanists, space-flight libertarians, and other denialists of a common earthly home. He rightly dismisses these as ethical and political non-starters.)

So what is this Terrestrial, and how does it relate to the Local and the Global? Latour identifies the Local with “soil,” which he takes to mean a bottom-up attention to the details of human-nonhuman entanglements, but without the national boundaries and identities of the past (or, put more crudely, without the “blood” of “blood and soil”). He identifies the Global with “world,” which entails an expansive understanding of possibilities or “forms of existence,” one that explicitly “forbids” us from “limit[ing] ourselves to a single location.” In effect, the Terrestrial takes the best from the Local and the Global and leaves behind their worst — a prospect that seems easier to propose than it is to implement.

To understand what this vision might look like in practice, he offers as a model the “ledger of complaints,” or “geo-graphy of grievances,” constructed over the period of five months in 1789 in the run-up to the French revolution. My knowledge of the period is almost nonexistent, so my suspicions that some might find the model too tame — in comparison, say, with more direct efforts at revolutionary self-management such as the Paris Commune — must rest in the realm of speculation. Latour’s intent with this, however, appears to be as an evocation of what it might mean to draw up a “bottom-up” redescription of the “dwelling places” making up a new “common world,” along with the “material stakes” at work in each.

The book presents itself as a bold intervention, but the lack of specifics on how to render the Terrestrial achievable will disappoint critics looking for a more prescriptive set of proposals. Latour anticipates this objection, polemically asking:

“Do I have to take up permaculture, lead demonstrations, march on the Winter Palace, follow the teachings of St. Francis, become a hacker, organize neighborhood get-togethers, reinvent witches’ rites, invest in artificial photosynthesis, or would you rather I track wolves?”

He even offers endnotes referencing most of these specific ideas, for those who think the list is casual or apocryphal. But his goal here is only to offer a kind of emotional map of the territory, with its proposal of a third “attractor,” and in this it should be compared against previous “third way” proposals, from the “neither left nor right but ahead” of the various Green parties that emerged in the 1980s to the Anthony Giddens inspired Clinton-Blair axis of the neoliberal 1990s. Comparing these in detail is difficult without practical policy proposals, but the overall argument that the others have failed due to a lack of appropriate “coordinates,” and therefore due to a failure of imagination, is provocative and worth considering.

Following his own dictum that “To land is necessarily to land someplace,” Latour ends, somewhat surprisingly, with a six-and-a-half page paean to a Europe chastened by its experience of the last few centuries, its “crimes” of colonial imperialism turned into the “assets” of non-innocence and an acceptance of reciprocity: “we went to your lands without asking your permission; you will come to ours without asking. Give and take. There is no way out of this.” This “provincialized” Europe can now re-enter the history of “an earth after modernization, with those whom modernization has definitively displaced.”

Again, the language is vague and reminiscent of some of the chastened Europhile writings of Derrida and other old world philosophers. While some may find this vagueness and the (mostly) avoidance of traditional political language off-putting, others may find a suggestive freshness to it that renders it open to new projects. “Dwelling places” are not so far, for instance, from radical environmentalists’ “bioregions,” without the biological determinism that too often smuggles itself into the latter discourse. Some may find its implicit abandonment of the national scale, with its (however badly compromised) democratic institutions, too high a price to pay for now (and the alternative of “dwelling places” too intangible).

The book’s evocations of “rage,” of planetary urgency, and of an animate earth add to a mix that will resonate with Latour’s readers and, hopefully, with some of the larger audience he is reaching these days (thanks to the New York Times’ tacit endorsement of his work in its surprisingly good magazine profile this week). Down to Earth is a small book and a quick read that helps cement Latour’s position as an important intellectual mapmaker of our times. But the details of its proposed reorientation remain to be worked out.

Statement of interest: I just hosted Latour for three days as the Dan and Carole Burack Lecturer at the University of Vermont, as part of the Feverish World symposium, and I thoroughly enjoyed his presence and participation, so my interest in his work is at this point not exactly impartial.