{"id":9881,"date":"2018-10-28T09:05:30","date_gmt":"2018-10-28T14:05:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/?p=9881"},"modified":"2021-06-10T08:53:47","modified_gmt":"2021-06-10T13:53:47","slug":"latours-terrestrial-project","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2018\/10\/28\/latours-terrestrial-project\/","title":{"rendered":"Latour’s terrestrial project"},"content":{"rendered":"

Review of Bruno Latour,\u00a0<\/span>Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime<\/a>,<\/em>\u00a0Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2018.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Down to Earth<\/em> is in significant part a restatement of Bruno Latour\u2019s theorizing over the last few decades, made more incisive in the light of Trumpism (and other illiberal populisms<\/a>) and brought to bear specifically on the moment of Trump\u2019s rejection of the Paris Climate Agreement. Latour assesses this rejection as a clarifying moment in what we are up against:<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

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\u2014a desire that is identified, quite inaccurately, with the “rise of populism.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

He takes all of these to be \u201dpart 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,\u201d <\/em>to build a \u201cgilded fortress,\u201d and to \u201cconceal the crass selfishness of such a flight out of the shared world\u201d 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 \u201ccome down to earth\u201d and \u201cland<\/em> somewhere,\u201d regaining our bearings within a new map of positions within which both \u201dthe affects <\/em>of public life\u201d and \u201cits stakes\u201d <\/em>can be redefined.<\/p>\n

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<\/em> (1991) and ultimately developed into the massive An Inquiry Into Modes of Existence<\/em> (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.<\/p>\n

The upshot of the effort is a fairly simple, and perhaps oversimplified, formula: against the twin \u201cattractors\u201d of the \u201cGlobal\u201d and the \u201cLocal\u201d — 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 \u201cTerrestrial.\u201d He has elsewhere used the image of Gaia (or \u201cGaia 2.0<\/a>\u201d), reconfigured with some philosophical rigor<\/a> from out of the writings of James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis, to describe how we might think of this \u201cnew political actor,\u201d but here he sidesteps that debate. (There is a fourth attractor, too — the \u201cOut-of-this-World\u201d of trans-humanists, space-flight libertarians, and other denialists of a common earthly home. He rightly dismisses these as ethical and political non-starters.)<\/p>\n

So what is this Terrestrial, and how does it relate to the Local and the Global? Latour identifies the Local with \u201csoil,\u201d 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 \u201cblood\u201d of \u201cblood and soil\u201d). He identifies the Global with \u201cworld,\u201d which entails an expansive understanding of possibilities or \u201cforms of existence,\u201d one that explicitly \u201cforbids\u201d us from \u201climit[ing] ourselves to a single location.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

To understand what this vision might look like in practice, he offers as a model the \u201cledger of complaints<\/a>,\u201d or \u201cgeo-graphy<\/em> of grievances,\u201d 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\u2019s intent with this, however, appears to be as an evocation of what it might mean to draw up a \u201cbottom-up\u201d redescription of the \u201cdwelling places\u201d making up a new \u201ccommon world,\u201d along with the “material stakes” at work in each.<\/p>\n

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:<\/p>\n

\u201cDo 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\u2019 rites, invest in artificial photosynthesis, or would you rather I track wolves?\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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 \u201cattractor,\u201d and in this it should be compared against previous \u201cthird way\u201d proposals, from the \u201cneither left nor right but ahead\u201d of the various Green parties<\/a> that emerged in the 1980s to the Anthony Giddens inspired Clinton-Blair axis<\/a> 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 \u201ccoordinates,\u201d and therefore due to a failure of imagination, is provocative and worth considering.<\/p>\n

Following his own dictum that \u201cTo land is necessarily to land someplace<\/em>,\u201d 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 \u201ccrimes\u201d of colonial imperialism turned into the \u201cassets\u201d of non-innocence and an acceptance of reciprocity: \u201cwe 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.\u201d This \u201cprovincialized\u201d Europe can now re-enter the history of \u201can earth after<\/em> modernization, with those<\/em> whom modernization has definitively displaced.\u201d<\/p>\n

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. \u201cDwelling places\u201d are not so far, for instance, from radical environmentalists\u2019 \u201cbioregions,\u201d 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).<\/p>\n

The book’s evocations of \u201crage,\u201d of planetary urgency, and of an animate<\/a> earth add to a mix that will resonate with Latour\u2019s readers and, hopefully, with some of the larger audience he is reaching these days (thanks to the New York Times\u2019<\/em>\u00a0tacit endorsement of his work in its surprisingly good\u00a0magazine profile<\/a> this week).\u00a0Down to Earth<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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<\/a>, and I thoroughly enjoyed his presence and participation, so my interest in his work is at this point not exactly impartial.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Review of Bruno Latour,\u00a0Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime,\u00a0Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2018. Down to Earth is in significant part a restatement of Bruno Latour\u2019s 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":99,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[520594,688977],"tags":[123519,58956,16796,58955,520593,4448,4439],"class_list":["post-9881","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-climate-politics","category-geo_philosophy","tag-bruno-latour","tag-climate-denialism","tag-cosmopolitics","tag-donald-trump","tag-down-to-earth","tag-ecopolitics","tag-political-ecology"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4IC4a-2zn","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":6306,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2012\/10\/30\/latour-on-gaia-natural-religion\/","url_meta":{"origin":9881,"position":0},"title":"Latour on Gaia & Natural Religion","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"October 30, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"Bruno Latour's upcoming Gifford Lectures sound remarkable.\u00a0See ANTHEM for the details. There could be no better theme for a lecture series on natural religion than that of Gaia, this puzzling figure that has emerged recently in public discourse from Earth science as well as from many activist and spiritual movements.\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Eco-culture"","block_context":{"text":"Eco-culture","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/ecoculture\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":6722,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2013\/06\/19\/aar-panel-on-latours-gifford-lectures\/","url_meta":{"origin":9881,"position":1},"title":"AAR panel on Latour’s Gifford Lectures","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"June 19, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"The AAR panel responding to 2013 Holberg Prize winner Bruno Latour's Gifford Lectures has now been scheduled. Information is as follows. QUERYING NATURAL RELIGION: IMMANENCE, GAIA, & THE PARLIAMENT OF LIVELY THINGS Session A23-203 (Co-sponsors: Social Theory & Religion Cluster and Religion & Ecology Group) Saturday November 23 - 1:00\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Academe"","block_context":{"text":"Academe","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/academe\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"http:\/\/lh5.ggpht.com\/--xAfcTWGDjA\/S7Vkj9ggieI\/AAAAAAAFu-4\/tPWceZDV1UI\/Bosch%25252C%252520Garden%252520of%252520Earthly%252520Delights%2525201510.jpg","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/lh5.ggpht.com\/--xAfcTWGDjA\/S7Vkj9ggieI\/AAAAAAAFu-4\/tPWceZDV1UI\/Bosch%25252C%252520Garden%252520of%252520Earthly%252520Delights%2525201510.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":13022,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2022\/10\/09\/r-i-p-bruno-latour\/","url_meta":{"origin":9881,"position":2},"title":"R.i.p., Bruno Latour","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"October 9, 2022","format":false,"excerpt":"Hearing the announcement of Bruno Latour's death earlier today, I remembered his visit to the Feverish World symposium, which I co-organized in 2018 in Burlington, Vermont. Despite his health (which was turning for the worse at the time), he participated gracefully in this strange mixture of conference, festival, and street\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Eco-theory"","block_context":{"text":"Eco-theory","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/ecophilosophy\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2022\/10\/image.png?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2022\/10\/image.png?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2022\/10\/image.png?resize=525%2C300&ssl=1 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2022\/10\/image.png?resize=700%2C400&ssl=1 2x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2022\/10\/image.png?resize=1050%2C600&ssl=1 3x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2022\/10\/image.png?resize=1400%2C800&ssl=1 4x"},"classes":[]},{"id":6873,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2013\/08\/22\/latourian-inquiries\/","url_meta":{"origin":9881,"position":3},"title":"Latourian inquiries","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"August 22, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"Bruno Latour fans will know that the French anthropologist's long-awaited follow-up to 1991's game-changing theoretical provocation We Have Never Been Modern was released in its English translation just a few weeks ago. The book is called An Inquiry Into Modes of Existence (and is becoming better known by its acronym\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Philosophy"","block_context":{"text":"Philosophy","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/geo_philosophy\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/ecx.images-amazon.com\/images\/I\/51zsdOn5Y6L._SY300_.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":7038,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2013\/11\/24\/querying-natural-religion-responses-to-latour\/","url_meta":{"origin":9881,"position":4},"title":"Querying Natural Religion: Responses to Latour","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"November 24, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"The following are my notes from \"Querying Natural Religion: Immanence, Gaia, and the Parliament of Lively Things.\" (Live-blogging did not work, as we didn't have a live internet connection.) These notes are followed by a brief set of post-event summary comments. The setting: an airplane hangar of a hall in\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Anthropocene"","block_context":{"text":"Anthropocene","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/anthropo_scene\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/0.academia-photos.com\/24090\/7811\/7448\/s200_adrian.ivakhiv.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":8049,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2015\/03\/09\/appearances\/","url_meta":{"origin":9881,"position":5},"title":"Appearances","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"March 9, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"My review of Graham Harman's recent book\u00a0Bruno Latour: Reassembling the Political, has been published online in the journal\u00a0Global Discourse. It's part of a book review symposium, which will be accompanied (in the print issue) by the author's reply to his\u00a0interlocutors. The journal has been publishing a lot on Latour's political\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Academe"","block_context":{"text":"Academe","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/academe\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9881","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/99"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9881"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9881\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9893,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9881\/revisions\/9893"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9881"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9881"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9881"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}