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The beginning of “what comes next”.

rights-of-nature-2

 

I conclude my little contribution to the exploration of Professor Bruno Latour’s work with a mind full of pertinent questions to ponder:

Are Latour, and those to whom he addresses his insights through the Gifford lectures, among others, really somewhat pessimistic? or is it just the scope and gravity of the topics under discussion which makes it appear so?
(Bonnitta went some way to explaining this in the last lecture concall dated 09-06-2013).

- A random musing related to this, does evolution favour optimism?

Do ‘we’ the people, called by the urgency of the times we are living in, have any hope at all of making the kinds of changes deemed necessary, at the required scale, in the apparent time frame being suggested?

Are Latour’s suggested frameworks for the nomos, demos and theos sufficient to the task for which we are heeding the call?

On a more pragmatic note:

What courses of action will likely be most effective in expediting the required shifts in decision making power structures that need to occur for the current concentrations of power, which are, according to scientific observations, corrupting the entire experience of life on earth, to be effectively redistributed?

The project of contoversy mapping [HERE] which I have become aware that Latour is engaged with aims to facilitate widespread public participation in decision making processes, how will this effect the “whole”?

“Technical democracy requires spaces and instruments to facilitate public involvement in technological and scientific issues. Such democratic equipment is yet to be assembled, even though much theoretical research has been done to envision its articulation. At the same time, digital innovations are providing an increasing number of new instruments and forums that can be used to promote public participation.”

What will it take for a planetary scale engagement of multi-disciplinary scientific and academic, as well as philosophical and pragmatic domains to be well enough co-ordinated that the planet can effectively “run itself”?

- Further to this, the planet already “runs itself”, however, there are factors in play which are influencing the way in which it does so, so how much actual resonse-ability we ‘we’ (who ever ‘we’ turn out to be) willing/able to take for the flow-on effects of such influential activities?

Assuming that this is possible, what kind of system/systemic structure would be the most “universally” desirable?
(this question of course will have myriad answers, but there must be some minimum viable requirements we can all agree upon, such as “supports life”, for instance).

I don’t pretend to know where to start answering these questions, but I am a perseverant soul, and these questions need explicitly answering as far as I am concerned. So even though this little crew has finished exploring this territory for now, I will continue to explore, inspired by the mounting pressure of compelling questions arising in me as I flow forward into “what comes next”.

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Doomed to Perish .. Destined to Rise Again ..

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It is of this secret strength that mountain and earth, stars and sea, the most elemental things of nature, sing. Yet the secret is told only to the imagination, capable, as it is, of celebrating what goes nonetheless unseen and unheard. Indeed the secret will always have been entrusted to those imaginings that can fill with song even those things that, like earth itself, remain silent and solitary.  ~ John Sallis  Force of Imagination

I want to talk about intentionality and agency. Consider for example, the weather. Early man had a conception of the weather (the sun, the stars, the moon) as being aspects of intentional beings — the gods. Early man created all kinds of ways to placate and plead with them. And then somewhere along the line, we got “smarter.”

Daoists are very smart shamans. They don’t ascribe intention to the weather, to plants, animals or people. Not especially. All intention is the purview of the Dao … and we feel it in ourselves as guiding purpose, and we share it with others as guiding discourse. There is agency everywhere, and this comes in an infinite variety, according to the abundant creativity of the Dao – the sophisticated Daoist is keen to learn the ways of the Way, until she becomes one with the One.

When I first started working with horses more closely than is commonly appreciated, I would ask question like “why is she angry today?” or “why does she always try to turn in the opposite direction?” Little by little (I am a slow learning Daoist) I realized these are not profitable questions. Very little of what is happening, when a person is engaging a horse, has to do with intention at the level of either the horse or the person. No, in this inter-species dance, there is only the arising of the Dao– the way things are in relation to each other. Little by little I learned to focus on body language, and emotion as energy, arising in the Dao-de dance. Without projection, without introspection, without emotion — the dance became stronger and softer, more powerful and more graceful, more subtle and more alive, less will-ful and more willing.

In the midst of a “dreaded thread” when the dance of inspiration and imagination falls into the sour soup of repetition and habit, this is where I go — straight to the heart of the Dao. What is the “pain body” if nothing but a habit in an endless sea of karma? What are triggers and knee-jerk reaction, obsessive attachments to knowing, the constant irritation of fear in all its guises (anger, frustration, disgust), and the compulsive need to question– except for patterns laid out in the architecture of the Dao. It’s the stuckness that exhausts the energy, when the Dao is trapped in the standing patterns between the two poles of Hafiz’s swing…

Without inspiration, absent imagination — the human phenomenon is more like the weather — unpredictable and agentic for sure — a complex, non-linear force moving with and against other forces according to the rules of the Dao. But without the freedom of choice, without the openings for novelty and creativity, I do not respond to these human figures as if they had intentionality, any more than I would respond to my torturer as if he were in control of the masochistic machine he had become. A rock might fall and hurt me, the mountain might throw me off and kill me, the wave might drag me under and quelch my breath — but I do not take these forces personally. And so more and more I do not take the force of a person, trapped as it were in the karma of emotional habit and lost in the  infertile desert of the computational mind, personally. A human being, without inspiration, absent imagination is the Dao forced into a small bottle.  You don’t expect much of that worn and tarnished bottle. But the Dao that is us, is the genii, wanting to come out.

I want to say please people, unleash your  inner genii !
Climate change is happening. Changes are coming. We are doomed not because Gaia is becoming more chaotic, but because we are becoming more predictable!

Gaia is revealing the Dao-on-Earth– which entails what it is to be a people, what it is to be animal, vegetable, mineral, elemental and energy. When all of life is extinguished from this earth, we will have realized our elemental selves, strewn about in the desertified seas. When the sun explodes, she will have returned us to our energy origins, and then as a death star, we will radiate out formlessness back to the dark edges of the universe. Makes you wonder.

If the near future is not quite as catastrophic as this, then “life as we know it” will decompose back down to subsets of what is sustainable upon the new earth. I think of my immediate community. Surrounded by farms, with friends that know  how to raise chickens and  prepare them for eating, milk cows and goats, deliver babies and butcher pigs — I feel safer than without them. The farmer who delivers our hay alone can teach us how to feed ourselves — and I practice every day. This makes me feel safer, stronger, younger, and gives me pleasure. One of our best friends, an Irish lad, can fix any combustible engine on the planet — and jury-rig it to run on anything that will burn. Trust me, he’s a “keeper.” I want to teach my morgan to pull a cart, a wagon, a load. The man who shoes our horses has 11 smart percherons — they might come in handy one day. While I am gardening, I watch the rabbits — we have tons of them here– and find I am imagining the day when I will be “ranching them.” Rabbits and chicken, I reason, can get us through. We have a 4-season stream and a pond. My back garden is a garden just for the bees. There are frogs all around. This makes me feel safe.

Still, I know that I am not very much prepared at all for the task of surviving the human species. Those few pastoral tribes deep in the desert and the narwhale people  and reindeer people  far up in the arctic will out-survive us all.  They will come together, these two so far apart, when the arctic becomes a desert, and the desert becomes a sea. They are beautiful expressions of the Dao — they make our species anti-fragile.  We should be protecting them! They are our seeds, our beginnings.

What then must we do?

Perhaps our task is to leave behind beautiful and enduring reminders of inspiration and imagination — so with our new start, we won’t have to start over. We will carry forward. This late 21st century people will be conspired about in the future in the same way we conspire about our alien relatives — imagined to be from another planet, perhaps they were just from another time.

Who are we? What are the people assembled here at the end, as Latour says?

We are the extemporanians.

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Demogenesis

There is no sense in engaging an audience in the
political theology of Nature, as I have done for two weeks, if at the end a
collective does not emerge that belongs to a clearly delineated territory; a
people who are endowed with a specific mode through which all the
agencies of their cosmos are being distributed and arrayed; who possess a
precise touchstone to tell friends from foes; a diplomatic reach wide
enough to engage in parleys with potential allies; and, who are
summoned by an entity — a divinity, a God, a set of gods, a god function
—through specific rituals that would make such a people conscious of
their existence. What I have been doing in this lecture series, is thus a
sort of thought experiment in ‘demogenesis’: an attempt at creating
artificially a people out of those who suffer under the universal bondage of naturalism.

A people able to liberate themselves from a cult
of Nature, not to reach the promised Land ‘of milk and honey,’ but, more
prosaically, to settle on the Earth they had fled because they had
mistaken It for some wholly imaginary pagan divinity.

nature versus sublunar oikos of Gaia

Gaia is the localized, historical and
secularized avatar of Nature. Or rather, Nature appears retrospectively
as the epistemological, politicized, religious, fabulous extension of
Gaia.

Obviously, at such a juncture, what would be needed is a
multiplicity of engagements and a proliferation of manners to behave as
humans on Earth. This would be the only way to cope with what the
multiple loops traced by the instruments of science reveal of the
narrative complexity and entanglement of Gaia. Bad luck, this is just
the time when under the name of globalization, the same definitions of
what it is to be human—equipped with exactly the same set of
calculative skills, the same narrow limits defining what it is to be an
individual, the same standardized ways of life, the same appetite for
consumption, the same limited range of communication and
information, the same format for feeling responsible, the same laws of
ownership, in brief the same version of The Economy—are supposed to
reign everywhere on Earth. To explore the nomos of the Earth, there is
no other instrument than the tiny range of patterns provided by
management and governance. The universalization of a provincial
definition of what it is to be a human has made the research for multiple
solutions appear impossible. Just at the time when first Nature had
begun to loosen its grip, the second Nature of The Economy imposes its
iron laws more tightly than ever.

easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism

Re-animate Incarnation

Science as ideology (science 1) — mechanistic language  that paradoxically

multiplies agency of Gaia

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Excerpts from “Networks, Societies, Spheres: Reflections of an Actor-network Theorist” – keynote from Bruno Latour, 2010

Presented to; the International Seminar on Network Theory: Network Multidimensionality in the Digital Age.

I have found in the notion of network a powerful way of rephrasing basic issues of social theory, epistemology and philosophy.

In its simplest but also in its deepest sense, the notion of network is of use whenever action is to be redistributed.

To put it at its most philosophical level … I’d say that a network is defined by the series of little jolts that allow the inquirer to register around and given substance the vast deployment of its attributes.

… whenever you wish to define an entity (an agent, an actant, an actor) you have to deploy its attributes, that is, its network.

Is not ecology anything but the deployment of all the attributes necessary for any self-contained entity to subsist? To be self-contained – that is to be an actor – and to be thoroughly dependent – that is to be a network – is to say twice the same thing.

Thanks to the notion of networks, universality is now fully localisable. In network, it’s the work that is becoming foregrounded, and this is why some suggest using the word worknet instead.

Networks are a great way to get rid of phantoms such as nature, society, or power, notions that before, were able to expand mysteriously everywhere at no cost. As the study of metrology, standards, empires, has shown so well, smooth continuity is the hardest thing to get. … Self-contained individuals fight for a place in the self-contained society.

[Latour makes the point that there only seem to be "parts and wholes" because of a discontinuity in the available data, and that qualitative and quantitative studies are necessarily interdependent.]

Instead of THE “individual v’s society” problem, we are now faced with the multiple and fully reversible combinations of highly complex individual constituents and multiple and fully reversible aggregates. The center stage is now occupied by the navigational tools.

Even though it seems commonsense to say that the whole is superior to the parts, a minute of reflection is enough to realise that this is due to the introduction of the discontinuity in data collections I mentioned earlier: you notice individuals reduced to a very few properties …

To believe in the existence either of the individual or of society is simply a way to say that we have been deprived of information on the individuals we started with; that we have little knowledge about their interactions; tht we have lost the precis conduits through which what we call the whole actually circulates. In effect we have jettisoned the the goal of understanding what the collective existence is all about.

.. the more you can individualise, the more you can quantify …

Individual action is much too distributed to be defined in terms of ‘inter’action. This is one of the first strange consequences of taking seriously the notion of actor-network.

… the whole is necessarily less complex than the individual who makes it possible, provided, that is, you accept not to reduce individuals to self-contained atomic entities but let them deploy the full range of their associates – which means of course that you need to have a lot of information about their profiles.

There is something always fishy and I believe deeply wrong in the idea of a whole superior to its parts.

There is something actually very bizarre in the attempts to apply models borrowed from natural sciences to social phenomena.

When Lippmann said the public is a phantom, this was not a way to say it does not exist, but on the contrary a plea – and a somewhat desperate plea – to make it appear through the intervention of the right tools.

[check out http://www.mappingcontroversies.net/%5D

btw – it would be great to have actual discussions of these points here in the comments – as I am no longer available to participate in the back channel group due to chronic personal underwhelm.

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Excerpts from “Spheres and Networks: Two ways to reinterpret globalism” – Bruno Latour, 2009.

Spheres and networks might not have much in common, but they have both been elaborated against the same sort of enemy: an ancient and constantly deeper apparent divide between nature and society.

There is not the slightest chance of understanding Being once it has been cut off from the vast numbers of apparently trifling and superficial little beings that make it exist from moment to moment – … it’s “life supports”. In one stroke, the philosophers quest for “Being as such” looks like an antiquated research program.

The opposite strategies of naturalisation and socialisation are able to stupify the mind only because they are always thought of separately. But as soon as you combine the two moves, you realise that nature and society are two perfectly happy bedfellows whose opposition is a farce. … The re-localisation and re-embodiment of science allows us to extract, so to speak, the epistemological poison out of the sweet honey of scientific objectivity.

There is no access to the global for the simple reason that you always move from one place to the next through narrow corridors without ever being outside. … Global talks are at best tiny topics inside well-heated hotel rooms in Davos.

The view form nowhere, so prevalent in the old scientific imagination, also means that there is nowhere for those who hold it to realistically reside. Could you survive a minute as a brain in a vat sepatated by a huge gap from “reality”? And yet this is the posture you are supposed to hold in order to think logically.

… the scientific worldview is unfair to human intentionality, spiritual values, and ethical dimensions …

The achievements of what I have called inscription and immutable and combinable mobiles are admirable, but they should not be confused either with a catastrophic diluvium or with the magnificent advent of Reason on earth. … The absurdly extensive definition of the res extensa is probably the most hidden but the most potent source of nihlism. Imagine that – the real world confused with the white expanse of a piece of paper!

Is space that inside which resides objects and subjects? Or is space one of the many connections made by objects and subjects?

… we still dont have, after two centuries of economics, a remotely realistic portrait of what an economy is, of the simple phenomena of confidence, trust and credit …

… the earth’s rotundity was still theoretical, geographical, at best aesthetic. Today it takes a new meaning because the consequences of our actions travel around the blue planet and come back to haunt us: It is not only Magellan’s ship that is back but also our refuse, our toxic wastes and toxic loans, after several turns. Now, we sense, we suffer from it: The earth is round for good. What the churces had never managed to make us feel – that our sins will never disappear – has taken a new meaning: there is no way to escape our deeds. And it burns like hell!

It is hard to realise that the trouble with nature is tied to the notion of space that has come form the confusion – instantiated in the res extensa – between the ways we come to know things and the way things stand by themselves.

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Who is the Enemy?

In Lecture 5, Latour wants us to ask “Who is the enemy?” We began by trying to define the demos — the people summoned by the theos — the positive approach. Now we are tyring to define the demos by drawing territorial lines around the enemy. One of the functions that “nature” performed in the past, was the premature unification of humans — that despite our warring factions, our ideologies and religious jihads we could find refuge in humans as a single entity when juxtaposed within the background of “nature.” And in that by-gone era, science was the “objective third party” that spoke for nature, and was neutral with respect to our warring factions. But no longer. Today at the end we find that science — which so cleverly avoided the religion debate by becoming the enemy of religion — science is now split into warring families — AGW advocates, and AGW deniers — a new kind of religious or ideological warfare that has been able to bring science down on its knees!

Could it be that science never really shook its own mythopoetic foundations in the first place? but in reality was playing a role very similar to those religious and quasi-religious ideologies that it had come to fear? And is this secular theology the nomos that summons GAIA?

Who then would be the enemy? Could it be that we have been fighting nature all along? and that the enemy of my enemy has become the globalizing and therefore globotomizing force of post-war secular humanism and the leviathan that we should be fearing?

 

In the question and answer session, Latour was asked to name the enemy — was it capitalism? But, he pointed out, capitalism was always juxtaposed with communism — which has proved perhaps to be even more of a perpetrator of environmental destruction, if not AGW. What then is the common enemy of BOTH capitalism and communism? Latour then offers a some candidates : labour? or humans emancipatory history?

MIGHT IT BE THAT THE HISTORY OF HUMAN EMANCIPATION IS THE ENEMY!!!!!!!

put that in the pipe and stoke it.

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Excerpts From “Waiting for Gaia. Composing the common world through arts and politics.” 2011, Bruno Latour.

… what has become of the sublime lately, now that we are invited to consider another disconnect, this time between, on the one side, our gigantic actions as humans I mean as collected humans, and, on the other side, our complete lack of a grasp on what we have collectively done?

If it is true that the “anthropos” is able to shape the earth literally (and not only metaphorically through its symbols), what we are now witnessing is anthropomorphism on steroids.

How to feel the sublime when guilt is knawing at your guts? And knawing in a new unexpected way because of course I am not responsible, and neither are you, you, nor you. No one in isolation is responsible.

The real wonder today is how I could be accused of being so guilty without feeling any guilt, without having done anything bad? The human collective actor who is said to have committed the deed is not a character that can be thought, sized up or measured.

It is through our own built-in indifference that we come to deny the knowledge of our science. Think of it: it would be so nice to return to the past when nature could be sublime and us, puny little humans, simply irrelevant, delighting in the inner feeling of our moral superiority over the pure violence of nature. In a way, the disconnect is the real source of the denial itself.

Apparently, there is no solution except to explore the disconnect and expect that human consciousness will raise our sense of moral committment to the level required by this globe of all globes, the Earth.

So what do we do when we are tackling a question that is simply too big for us? If not denial, then what? One of the solutions is to become attentive to the techniques through which scale is obtained and to the instruments that make commensurability possible. After all, the very notion of anthropocine implies such a common measure. If it is true that “man is the measure of all things” it could work also at this juncture.

It is useless for the ecologically motivated activist to try shaming the ordinary citizen for not thinking globally enough, for not having a feel for the Earth as such. No one sees the Earth globally and no one sees an ecological system from Nowhere, the scientist no more than the citizen, the farmer or the ecologist – or, lest we forget, the earthworm. Nature is no longer what is embraced from a far away point of view where the observer could ideally jump to see things “as a whole”, but the assemblage of contradictory entities that have to be composed together.

Since it is now the worlds that are in question, let’s compare cosmologies with one another. Instead of trying to distinguish what can no longer be distinguished, ask these key questions: what world is it that you are assembling, with which people do you align yourselves, with what entities are you proposing to live?

… the task is to follow the threads with which climatologists have built the models needed to bring the whole Earth on stage. With this lesson in hand we begin to imagine how to do the same in our efforts to assemble a political body able to claim its part of responsibility for the Earth’s changing state.

I’d like to explore how different Gaia is from Nature of olden days. … First, Gaia is not a synonym of Nature because it is highly and terribly local [confined to THIS planet - GD] … Second, Gaia is not like Nature, indifferent to our plight … She is at once extraordinarily sensitive to our action and at the same time She follows goals which do not aim for our well being in the least. … She is too fragile to play the calming role of old nature, too unconcerned by our destiny to be a Mother, too unable to be propitiated by deals and sacrifices to be a Goddess. … Gaia is a scientific concept … assembled from bits and pieces … most of them coming from scientific disciplines. … As far as I can figure, Gaia is just a set of positive and negative cybernetic loops … It just happens that those loops have had the completely unexpected effect, one after the other, of furthering the conditions for new positive and negative loops of evermore entangled complexity. … The gerat thing about Lovelock’s Gaia is that it reacts, feels and might get rid of us, without being ontologically unified. It is not a superorganism endowed with any sort of unified agency.

Cultures used to “shape the Earth” symbolically; now they do it for good. Furthermore, the very notion of culture went away along with that of nature. Post natural, yes, but also post cultural.

Our disconnect might not reside in expecting the end and then having to reorganise our belief system to account for why its not coming … for us today the disconnect could be in believing that Doomsday is not coming once and for all. … And denial, this time, would mean that we are rearranging our belief system so as not to see the Great Coming.

I hope, … to have shown why it might be important, even urgent, to bring together all the possible resources to close the gap between the size and scale of the problems we have to face and the set of emotional and cognitive states that we associate with the tasks of answering the call to responsibility without falling into melancholia or denial.