Bruno Latour: Modernity is Politically a Dangerous Goal
By Patricia Junge, Colombina Schaeffer and Leonardo Valenzuela (Verdeseo) In November 2014, Bruno Latour visited Chile to participate in the Puerto de Ideas festival in Valparaíso. During his visit he generously met to talk about his work with some local followers. Verdeseo had the opportunity to interview him and discuss various details of his prolific career.1
Who is Bruno Latour? Bruno Latour is a French philosopher, sociologist and anthropologist particularly prominent in the field of Science and Technology. He was born in Beaune, Burgundy, in 1947 and did his PhD at the University of Tours in 1975. He is currently Professor at the Paris Institute of Political Studies (Sciences Po) and the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). Most of his international recognition happened while he was working at the Centre for the Sociology of Innovation at ParisTech, he stood there until 2006. Latour has published 15 books and more than one hundred scholarly articles, along with a series of publications aimed at reaching wider audiences; some highlights of the latter are his collaborations with the ZKM in Karlsruhe, where he has made two art exhibitions: Iconoclash (2002) and Making Things Public (2005). Recently, his interest in combining his scholarly reflections with the exploration of alternative mediums and publics resulted in the production Gaia Global Circus. In 2013, Latour was awarded the Holberg Prize, one of the most prestigious academic honours in the social sciences. However, the award did not come exempt of 1
Picture of Bruno Latour, source: Cultures Toulouse. 1
controversy after some Norwegian academics (Jon Elster, Stig Frøland and Nils RollHansen) requested it to be cancelled accusing Latour of being a relativist. Such accusation has crossed Latour's career and was the centre of the so-called "Science wars", which were intensified in the nineties with the Sokal affair.
What is his work about? Latour takes the direction of Nietzsche (death of god) and Foucault (death of man) declaring the death of nature as an essence. We are no longer facing a pure and clearly constituted nature, but the product of multiple and messy distinctions. Our contemporary worlds have seen a proliferation of hybrids of nature and culture. Consider, for example, Patagonian huemul deer wearing digital identifiers, counted from helicopters, to assess the possibility of destroying a river in Patagonia by the construction of a hydroelectric dam, which electricity should be transported for thousands of miles to meet the needs of the Chilean mining industry. Science and knowledge play an important role producing the distinctions through which we represent the world, in the sense of the will to power/knowledge that characterises constructivism. However, what Latour shows is that we are not dealing with an arbitrary constructionism, emphasizing the affective factor of knowledge, shaping a renewed materialism. Things provoke us and these propensities are the basis of our engagement with the world. Latour says that, following Vinciane Despret, to have a body is to learn to be affected, to be set in motion by others. Through prosthesis we are able to expand that capacity to be affected. Thus, the inventions of the most diverse tools and instruments expand our capacity for action and our sensitivity to the world. Actor-network theory (ANT), to which Latour is one of its most famous proponents, aims precisely at observing multiple realities through the threads of heterogeneous entities that shape a world always on the move. In the origins of ANT, the idea was to find out ethnographically how scientific truths are created in laboratories, a blow to the idea that the truths of science are independent from scientist’s practices. On the foundations of Modernity we find the idea that mankind will at some point be able to control the planet and stabilize it as a perfect world, the illusion of progress. Today, when we discuss the magnitude of the global ecological crisis and put it in terms of the Anthropocene – an age where humanity reaches a geological intensity and depth –, Latour suggests that we should be oriented to the space rather than time, dealing with the problems of limits and simultaneity. Today, it is time to look at the chances of survival of humanity within the limits of Gaia and human capacities to compose a planetary sphere beyond escapist fantasies, accepting the Earth as our home. Compose involves moving away from ideas like grow first and fix later, and seriously consider whether it is desirable to keep destroying in order to feed consumption’s bottomless greed.
Why is he relevant for Verdeseo? When Verdeseo was created in late 2007, the diagnosis we had regarding the environmental movement and the state of green politics in Chile was influenced to a large extent by our approach to the work of Latour. Verdeseo’s proposal has been to think green politics away from the elitism of those environmentalisms enamoured
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with a rigid idea of nature. Latour points out that the environment is no longer out there, but among us and, for Verdeseo that is clear call to action to think green politics as a broader political project and also as one of the most important transformative movements of the XXI century.
Interview to Bruno Latour
Picture of Valparaíso’s Harbor (By Ariel Cruz Pizarro, available in Wikimedia Commons)
- Verdeseo (VD): In “We Have Never Been Modern” you characterized the moderns by their movements of purification and translation that produce hybrids, a somewhat negative character (monsters) that the moderns conceal from themselves. How do you see these movements in Latin American societies, where hybridism is somehow unavoidable, and even welcomed and embraced? You meet hybrids everywhere, and even our institutions and our modernities are quite hybrid. - Bruno Latour (BL): It depends on what you mean by hybrids because there are two meanings. One is the one I use in “We Have Never Been Modern”, which is series of heterogeneous associations with completely different types of ontologies. It’s what anthropologists will describe if they have to study a harbor, or a city, or a collective, as we say. But this meaning of hybrid should not be confused with a hybrid between modernity and archaism, which is also, of course, a way in which people will use the notion of modernity to account for a situation. That is exactly the hybrid I don't want to address because then it means that every situation will be cut into two pieces. One is more like old and archaic, and the other is more like futurist and up to date. And
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that is of course what then led to complete absurdities, like the notion of “unfinished modernity” or “interrupted modernity”. These are concepts with no meaning because now everybody is in the same situation everywhere. One of the effects of globalization is that nobody is modern or everybody is modern or everybody is interrupted. I think we should get rid entirely of the notion of modern to describe any situation. In Buenos Aires, I gave lectures on that question. I spent two days with Argentineans telling me about the unfinished modernity. Then I quoted a piece from Le Monde of two or three days ago, where the man responsible for the development of Paris said, "Not to do this project will be a bad sign because people would really know that France has great reluctance to enter modernity". And he was talking about Paris! And Paris is supposed to be, in Walter Benjamin's view, the "capital of modernity". Modernity has absolutely no meaning whatsoever, so in that sense what happens in Latin America is exactly like what happens everywhere else. Modernity is useless. Now, of course hybrids and composition, and what people say about modernity is interesting, it is a topic to be analyzed, but not a resource. I don't think modernity is a resource to do anything. - VD: We studied social sciences and humanities in Chile and the question on modernity is central to the whole study. So for us it is surprising to see someone from Europe saying to Europeans you also have never been modern. The movement is interesting because you are actually saying to them, "Hey, we have never been modern", while here the discussion is: “can we even be modern? Are there multiple modernities or not? Are we an incomplete modern world? Or do we have to assume that we are something else?” - BL: I mean, as a topic to study it, it is interesting to ask why do people keep talking about modernity as a frontier, even though it means nothing, because it is part of globalization, it is a push. So when people use modern and its features, it usually means they want to destroy something. They are actively doing politics. So I think the discourse of modernity has to be constantly counteracted. When people talk about modernity, they mean that they want to achieve something, which usually is politically dangerous. So let’s talk about composition and not about modernity. We have to compose with different things, which we have to sort one after the other. We have to decide on any connection and not buy a packaged set of connections. Modernism is always packaging things that are supposed to be connected. So if you are this, then you have to have certain beliefs in, for example, the economy, and you have to have certain belief in morals, etcetera. - VD: We discussed a lot this idea of composition before interviewing you. Because one of the challenges we have to face as Chileans studying abroad is that we read all kinds of academic works, but then we have to think what do with these in our own reality. In Latin America, there is a movement of scholars who are also talking about relational ontologies, which is also related with the existence of indigenous people doing things that actually challenge in practice the idea of modernity. For instance, Marisol de la Cadena studied a group of people trying to stop a mining project arguing that the mountain said, “You shouldn't do the project”. So, how do we bring these two academic worlds together? In academia, we also have to compose something together, which is a tricky challenge.
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- BL: But again, this is not specific to Latin America. The French constantly move outside. There is a great tendency of the intellectual to be offshore, by which I mean globalized. But the situation has completely changed. Nowadays everybody is trying to be back to certain redefinition of what it is to pertain to a territory. So, there is a rerooting of intellectual life, again, around the notion of composition. After all composition has the same root as “compost”. Donna Haraway played a lot with this link between compost and composition. In this sense, the problem is not specific to Latin America. There is a sort of transnational speculation, not financial speculation, but an intellectual speculation. The task is to relocate because of the ecological situation, to relocate in different places, to relocate in the land. What it is to belong to the land of Chile, a very specific land, is a question, which is also raised in France, what it is to belong to Europe, which is no longer the Europe of the past. So I think it is a general problem. Composition and re-rooting in a territory are the same question. I think the general question is how not to be offshore. - VD: How not to be offshore... - BL: Because offshore is finance and offshore is intellectual and globalized thought. It doesn't mean that you don’t feed from other things. And it is not the same 19th century identity search, identity as what the soul of Chile is or the soul of France is. It is different. It is just that we need to have land under our feet to survive. So it is a very different question, it means a different way of belonging. And of course belonging was the old idea, the supposedly archaic idea, out of which modernism was made. - VD: The anthropologist Arturo Escobar develops a concept of territory, which means an entanglement of cultures, natures and places. And for him, who studies social movements in Colombia, what these movements in Colombia do, is exactly that work of composition. - BL: I think Escobar is perfectly right. Paradoxically, everywhere the notion of rerooting, in a different sense than the old concept of identity, is visible. I think it is a very powerful movement, and it is linked to ecology of course, but ecology has its own problems. - VD: On that note, do you perceive that environmentalists today are still reproducing a transcendental and essentialist idea of nature? Or do you see any major change in environmentalism and green politics since the publication of “Politics of Nature”, 15 years ago? We want to bring you to the discussion on environmental movements, and their internal diversity. How do you see them? Have they evolved, fed by scientific thinking, even by your own work? - BL: Have they moved? I don't know, I would like to know what happened here, but in France the answer is no, they haven’t moved. They have been marginalized because of themselves, because they think marginally and still in terms of green parties. I have to emphasize that I am talking about the thinking because of course in practice, like everywhere else, we have evolved realizing that the environment is over. Everybody is post-environmentalist, to use a term of the Breakthrough Institute (from which I’m a member, even though I disagree with their position all the time). In
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practice everyone has become post-environmentalist. Unfortunately, I don't see much intellectual work being done to say this has nothing to do with the environment but with the whole collective. So, what I did in “Politics of Nature” was to analyze the disconnect between massive and very important and interesting activism and the generally poor intellectual work done on what it is in the end to absorb the end of nature, the end of naturalism, the re-territorialization, the end of the notion of modern, the extraordinary innovation of the sciences. This was not as visible 15 years ago as it is now, and I would say the situation has not changed that much. People still fight as the environment was outside of us and as it was not the definition of what it is to be a society. So, if you say for example, a society is made of anchovies as well as people, but not in the naturalist definition that we are linked by nature, I don't think it has moved that much. - VD: On the other hand, it is also interesting that the environmental question has also moved to non-environmentalist’s domains. - BL: Yes, and it is also banalized. Activism is localized everywhere in very interesting issues, from slow food to carbon, and so on. And everybody, so to speak, sort of absorbs from this activism. But the work, which still should be done, is to say this is not an ecological crisis, it is a mutation. And it is not just about adding a few things about carbon and CO2 to a normal human society. On the contrary, it is to reflect on what it is to be in a society, in a collective. I think this work has not been done yet. In other words, there has been no transition from the deep ecologist of the 20th century to now. Lots of people in feminist theory and anthropology have moved a lot, like Philippe Descola, Viveiro de Castro and Eduardo Kohn, but that is not registered publicly. This is the center of the question. The public is still thinking that environment means outside, that it is a special interest. And we have political parties devoted to this special interest, as a one-issue party, as if they would not be dealing with housing and everything else. However, in practice they deal with these issues as well, but this is not framed as such in representational politics. In other words, politics is still the politics of humans. - VD: What we see is that struggles that are not framed as environmental struggles are actually people doing political ecology in practice, although it is not framed in that way. For example, this happens very frequently in struggles related to indigenous movements. What happens is the same you are describing. The media and/or other actors do not treat them as environmentalists. While environmentalists are characterized as these kinds of elitist, small groups that want to protect a certain tree or piece of territory. - BL: If a dispute about copper is about the danger to the miner of the copper industry, it is called a social crime. If it is about the fact of pushing the waste, it is called an ecological crime. But, what about copper itself, as an industry? Is it not supposed to be central to the environmental movement? It is exactly as central as miners’ health or as waste. And of course every activist will agree with this, but the representation of the ecological movement would still say: “oh, no, no, only the waste question is an ecological question, the other one is a social questions and the other an economical question”. You can be socialist in one, you can be socialist in the other, but you cannot be socialist in the three. However, to build new collectives you need to
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consider the three at the same time. So this is why I think there is no way to get back to environmentalism, environmentalism is the past. - VD: We want to ask you about power. If we assume that ontologies are multiple and relational, where do we locate differences and power asymmetries? There has been a lot of criticism, especially in Latin America, that this idea of multiplicity erases conflict, hegemony, domination and asymmetries. So how would you answer to this criticism and include questions on asymmetries and power? - BL: I think you have to reverse the question and ask: when do people use the notions of power and asymmetry? What is the landscape that we imagine as the ideal? I always suspect when the landscape we imagine as the ideal is flat, where there would be no power relations and where all relations would be symmetrical. Behind the notion of power is the idea that power is something that should not be carried out, that it is a sort of deviation from the path represented by something we have in mind that is probably reason, or solidarity, or peacefulness. However, people like me never believe in peacefulness as symmetry. I don’t use so much the notion of power, because asymmetry, in the landscape we try to describe, is everywhere. If you describe a mountain from here to Buenos Aires, you will need to follow one calibrated instrument and describe how this one instrument registers differences, what in my work is actor-network theory (ANT). For example, we think the pampa is very flat and then we see it goes up and down! So, to register asymmetry you need a notion that does not use the word power because when you use power there is always this idea that you could actually get rid of it. That power has to disappear, that it is abnormal. But asymmetry is the nature of the landscape you are describing. Moreover, if you mean by multiplicity association in the ANT sense of the word, that is as heterogeneous connections, which have to be composed, it means you have to be amazingly precise on the nature of the asymmetry. That is, this man here or this woman there is actually producing, in this specific place, a pattern which is spreading in this way and which has to be attacked. Is this power? Yes, of course it is power. But power doesn’t add anything to that description. The primary problem of the notion of power is that it withdraws something from the description, because it says: “Ideally, we could do without power”. So power is a drug, it is a sort of poison that is used because people feel good about doing so, “Ah, I’m describing power relations”. But the problem is that they never do it because in fact they replace the analysis of the asymmetry in a specific place, where specific effects have been produced, by this sort of overall ideal. They assume that if they speak about power, the work already is done. But as long as you are not able to identify where danger is being produced and modified, abstain from using the notion of power. That is why I’m very suspicious about people who use power. It is basically a left over from the Left, an old idea that assumes that we should address power because they imagine that they could get rid of it. - VD: Is it like a shortcut? - BL: Yes. Could you imagine describing a landscape where there would be no power? Actually, I put power at the heart where it was not supposed to be: in science! So, I’m not impressed by those criticisms. Others put power everywhere, but not in science. And in science, where we show it, asymmetry is everywhere, the scientist
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that published this here and not there, etcetera, everything is completely asymmetrical in science. But then, it doesn’t mean that you have to add the notion of power. Because if you add it, what do you add? This is a question I have never understood. What is added by adding the notion of power? Yes, it is asymmetrical. It is like saying the Andes are high. Yes they are high. Now, if you want to walk it up and down you need lots of trucks. Where are the trucks, how do we mobilize them, which road do we take, which tools do we need to walk it up. These are the questions we have to ask. - VD: When we bring these ideas to a context like ours and we talk about relational or multiple ontologies and that the world is composed, then, the usual comment is:, “Yes, of course there are different ontologies, but the modern ontology, for instance, has been imposed on the indigenous ontologies, because they are more powerful or hegemonic.” - BL: Which is true… - VD: Yes. And so, what can we do with your theory to think about these issues in a different way? - BL: I get this all the time too. Let’s take Eduardo Kohn’s book on the thinking of the forest. There, multiple ontologies means to bring the voice of the natives not as being supported by social activists, but according to their own ontology. And this makes a big difference because then the fight is actually very strong and the natives are right to say we have to fight. Of course they have to fight, fighting is right. And this moves us to a very different plane, when you say, “It is not just that we want to make the subordinated to speak, but we want to listen to the way they understand everything, including speech and including what it is to have a forest thinking”. And then, the so called socialist Left and the well meaning people are done with the fight because they say, “No, no, we are not going to spend time listening to these bizarre views of all these people who believe that the forest is thinking.” So it is exactly the opposite, we have to fight against these people who want to stop multiplicity to unfold in the name of activism. And of course in the question on nature this is very important, because the resource for us lies largely in the thousands of struggles for alternative ontologies, which are actively maintained and instituted by many people. So we need these resources, we cannot say: “well, it is all about social relations and power”. That is what is lost when you use the notion of power: you loose the ability to listen to ontological alternatives. And that is why pluralism is very important, politically. This is the primary part of The Parliament of Nature. If we assume we have to assemble everyone under our own definition of power struggle, it means that those who enter in the power struggle will have to follow our views of what a power struggle is. We have to listen when they say, “It is the mountain which told us not to mine”. Instead of assuming that this is a sort of amusing affection, or maybe a useful slogan or a justification, what would happen if we say, “Ok, what would it mean for a mountain to think? What would it change?” And this is a political struggle! But as far as I can say this is of no interest for those who concentrate on hegemony. And of course ontologies are fighting everywhere. This is the whole issue. Ontologies are made to fight. I criticize the notion of power, because behind it the idea of pacification is hidden, that fighting could and should disappear. This is why power is considered by some as dangerous and as a distortion. The same argument
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goes in epistemology. It is said that social relations in science are a distortion from the right relations, which should go straight. And what we call “social” would be a distortion from the right path of reason. With power is the same. It is assumed it should go straight. - VD: This is what you mean when you say power is oblique? - BL: Yes, the common use of the notion of power means that something that is oblique should go straight. But no one ever says what would it mean for power to be straight! - VD: In your book “An Inquiry Into the Modes of Existence” (AIME), you write about affects. Likewise, we can read about affects in other authors who use words like trust and love. We wanted to ask you: What is the place of “love” in the composition of the common world? - BL: You want me to define love?! - VD: Yes. Because academics usually do not speak about love, and you use words like love, care, and so on. So we want to ask you how you bring love into the composition of worlds. - BL: Being affected is a main part of the shift on ontological pluralism. Which means that you are interested not in what humans are but on what are humans impacted or affected by. This is part of pragmatism, but it is also part of many philosophical traditions. What it means is that you are now looking at the nature of the beings that come to you and not to what you are. Basically, this is the shift that the modes of existence project tries to register. Now, traditionally in our culture, which has been expanded as modern, there are two types of beings that may come to you. One is what I call beings of metamorphosis [MET]2, which are actually very badly treated by the moderns. They are treated as sacrological affects, as if they would be coming from us and not from the beings. But the whole anthropology, on the contrary, is full of descriptions of the ways other cultures treat this; it would not be treated as love, but it would be treated as learning to be affected and transformed, as being metamorphosized by what comes to you. Basically, the whole analysis of ritual is around that. And then, there is another one that has been called love in our tradition, which has a long and very complex history. It is nowadays more or less related to religion [REL]. It is the meeting of beings that transforms you when they come to you. It is not exactly the same as metamorphosis. It is connected to it. They resonate with one another, but they are not the same. And love, in that sense, is articulated and described as something like salvation or being resurrected, being transformed to a point where you just live a different life after that. So love is considered as the opposite of death basically. It can be articulated in religious terms, as resurrection. Or it can be articulated in more mundane things, for instance. I can date my life from the moment I met my wife 45 years ago, which is a 2
Latour used the coding of his latest book, “An Inquiry Into the Modes of Existence”, when addressing these questions. [MET] and [REL] are two of those modes of existence.
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way of describing it, of cutting time. So it is basically related to a cut in time and to radical transformation. And it is elaborated in many, many different ways. - VD: And what would be the difference between these two definitions of love, [MET] and [REL]? - BL: Well, the anthropology of the modern should develop a lot. But it is somehow related to the distinction between salvation and curing. Which is for example visible in the candomblé. You are cured but not saved necessarily. The divinities of the candomblé are very good at curing or metamorphosizing you, but not at saving you. Other gods are good at saving, but not at curing. So the inquiry has to be made anthropologically. I think it is very different. - VD: And there is also the distinction between curing and caring, too. For example, Annemarie Mol in her book “The Logic of Care” asks what do we do when diseases are not curable, and she describes how in these cases people take care. - BL: Yes, but care is a multimodal term. As important as to be careful and to care when you write or when you drive. The opposite to care is careless. Moderns haven’t been good at being careful. They are pretty careless. This would be a good definition of moderns: careless. We are freed from the constraints of the past, so we can be careless, and we still are, even now. - VD: Let’s now turn to a final and maybe bizarre question: would it be possible to be 21st century romantics? - BL: Why do you want to be a romantic?! - VD: Because the 19th century romantics initiated a counter-movement from inside modernity. They wanted to bring to the surface nature, affects and not just modern progress and rationality. However, they reified nature in the process and reproduced the notions of the moderns. So, is it this what we need, to re-invent a way of being 21st century romantics? - BL: I think that would be a catastrophe! Because the romantics were already late in the game! Well, it depends on when in the 19th century you want to be, if it is the German Naturphilosophie, it is particular. In a way, this romanticism was highly connected to science itself. So in that sense it might make sense considering re-using, if not the same name, which is catastrophic, some of the views of this German and French romanticism. On the contrary, if you use romanticism in the banal sense of anti-modern it would be a wrong move, because these romantics were already absorbing the definition of science, reason and politics, which they should have better criticized. Instead, they absorbed it with them when saying we are “anti”. So in a way, this romanticism entrenched for the rest of the century, and certainly for the 20th century, too, the idea that affect was on one side and reason was in another. All the reificated notions were actually emphasized by this romanticism. So I think the direction should be, in a way, strongly anti-romantic. In political ecology, today we are not saying that we should enjoy the beautiful view from this window and not talking about the containers [referring to the
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harbor in Valparaíso]. Visually in the arts to be a romantic would be to say: “well, I’m a romantic, so I’m not going to paint this [pointing to a container] and this [pointing to the storehouses]. I’m only going to paint the nice view here with the visual beauty of the old façades and maybe, if I’m socially sensitive, I will go to the shantytown and paint it”. And what we need is exactly the opposite move. The harbor is what has to be considered, the containers, the storehouses, the boats; to understand why they are placed there in this way. We shouldn’t have such a limited view about what the world is like. The call of my anthropology is the opposite, it puts at the center the economy, technology, science, and of course we have to represent it differently. So when you see the harbor you say: “Wow, it is much more complex, interesting, dangerous…”. And of course all of that could be covered -to go back to the question before- by the notion of hegemony. Because when you have hegemony there, all of these things are the same. So you have no alternative. And the only alternative is to say: “well, I’m interested in the periphery, in the shantytown, in the others”, and you flee, which is another romantic attitude, to flee! So it is exactly the opposite move, we have to say: “let’s get into it”. And this is especially important for environmental studies, where the sciences are so essential. The way is not to say that we are not interested in science, that we want a more holistic, affective connection with the topics of our interest. On the contrary, what is interesting are the sciences. The more I work with scientists, the more you discover how affected we are, especially in environmental sciences. And we are reservedly affected, of course.
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