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.

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

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.

In the 4th Lecture, Latour ends with the notion of our actions looping around to kick us in the ass with consequences, and that one of the ways in which we can confront climate and environmental crises is to magnify the number of ways in which the action(s) can loop around and kick us. I begin to suspect he is weaving in here his notion of agency as mediation — we are all mediators in the looping — because he also says that when that loop is broken, then we become “less sensitive” to the consequences of our action (less sensitive to Gaia’s irritation, as it were).

I am also thinking of Harthsorne’s notion of moral impulse as being concerned with one’s future self. One’s present self might want to enjoy a large carbon footprint, but one’s future self will suffer from it, the same way a smoker enjoys smoking, at the expense of his future self.

However, those who do not believe in the crisis level of our current situation, will not see one’s future self as in any predicatment, vis-a-vis one’s present actions. Therefore, it is up to us to mediate those loops.

Also thinking of Bhaskar saying “of course we can move from facts to value” — science gives us the facts, and we mediate them (compose) the values from them.

Also in the question part, Latour makes the point of scale of the Anthropocene, which switches the symbolic sensitivity to literal sensitivity.

We have all read Lord of the Flies, a story about young boys stranded
by accident on an island from which they could not escape either and
where they glide down the slippery slope to barbarity. It is not casting
aspersions on William Golding’s reputation to surmise that—when
after quite a few beers in the Wiltshire village of Bowerchalke’s little
pub, he suggested that Lovelock should call his theory ‘Gaia’ —he
certainly had not reread his Hesiod for a long time. If he had, he would
have known that he was placing on his friend an ominous curse from
which his theory might never recover. And the same is certainly true of
the many New Age rituals where people assemble to celebrate Gaia as a
benevolent, caring, maternal whole.
No, she is not maternal, or else you should change entirely what
you mean by ‘Mother!’ In Theogony, far from being a figure of harmony,
Gaia, the mythological character, emerges in great effusions of blood,
steam and terror together with Chaos and Eros. In Hesiod’s admittedly
biased narrative, she is an earthly, black, brown, dark skinned and
scheming monster, a feminine power that three times in a row tricks
her progeny into murdering her loved ones… She first pushes her son
Kronos to cut with a ‘jagged teeth iron sickle’ her husband Ouranos’
sexual parts — showering blood all around, every drop begetting a
horrible monster. Then, together with Rheia, Gaia convinces Zeus to
fight against his own father and to defeat him. But then, never at rest,
she plots to mobilise her last child, Typhon — a hundred snakeheads
monster—, to destroy the empire of her son Zeus. The Olympian
fortunately wins, but the poor humans are now victims of Typhon’s
irresistible winds, tempests and cyclones. And only then did Gaia stop
scheming (according at least to Hesiod’s story). Sorry to say, but Gaia, at
least viewed from the later point of view of the Olympian gods, is a
dangerous figure.

In lecture 3 Latour moves from the narratives which are constructive (outside agency, de-animated/over-animated) to one of autopoiesis .. the notion that the earth, its atmosphere and its inhabitant co-create each other in a kind of dance.

Galileo and Lovelock
Lovelock and Pasteur

Geophysics, geochemistry, geophysiology.
Geo-centricism.

the philosophy of biology has never stopped borrowing its metaphors from the social realm

It is haunted by the spectre of an ‘organism’ which is
always, in sociology as well as in politics or economics, a ‘superorganism,’
that is, an actor to which is delegated the task — or rather the
mystery — of coordination. The puzzle of composing a body raises
exactly the same difficulty whether it is made of cells, of humans, of
ants, of bees or in the case of a watch, made of cogs, springs and wheels.
If we wish not to lose sight of the problem of coordination, we should
stick to one level only and see what scientists really mean by a ‘whole
superior to the parts.’ Biology and sociology are in exactly the same
quandary. Through my work on social theory, I have learned to be very
quick at detecting when people shift from one research program —
understanding how coordination is obtained — to another one — getting
rid of the problem by jumping to another level, be it that of ‘society,’
market, Leviathan, corporate body, system, structure, or any emergent
kind of a ‘whole.’ The stakes are very high for us because, as soon as a
super-organism is taken for granted, it’s not only science but politics as
well as theology that may disappear. This is why it is so crucial to
understand whether the figure of Gaia is unified and through which
channels.

The anatomy of Gaia is forever changing…

I am under the impression that the
question cannot be answered before we understand what Lovelock
takes as its main intuition — the intuition according to which
everything that used to be in the background has been sucked in the
foreground.

It is not that Gaia is
some ‘sentient being’ but that the concept of ‘Gaia’ captures the
distributed intentionality of all the agents that are modifying their
surroundings to suit themselves better.

For Lovelock and Margulis,
taking things literally, there is no environment any more. Since all living
agents follow their intentions all the way by modifying their own
neighbours as much as possible, it is quite impossible to tell apart what
is the environment to which an organism adapts and what is the point
where action starts.

If there is no frame, no goal, no direction, we have to take Gaia as
the name of the process by which varying contingent occasions have
been offered a chance to render later events more probable. Gaia is
neither a creature of chance nor of necessity. Which means that it looks
a lot like what we have come to take as history itself. Such is the last trait I
wish to emphasize.

Have we finally drawn the face of Gaia? No, obviously not. At
least, I hope I have said enough to convince you that finding the ‘place
of Man in Nature’ — to use an old expression — is not at all the same
thing as to narrate the geostory of the planet. By bringing into the
foreground everything that used to remain in the background, we don’t
expect to live at last in ‘harmony with nature.’ There is no harmony in
this contingent cascade of unforeseen events and there is no nature
either — at least not in this sublunary realm of ours. But to learn how to
situate human action into this geostory is not — such is the crucial
lesson — to ‘naturalise’ humans either. No unity, no universality, no
indisputability, no indefeasibility is to be invoked when humans are
thrown in the turmoil of geostory. You could say, of course, that this
rendering is much too anthropomorphic. I hope it is and fortunately so,
but not in the old sense of imputing human values to an inert world of
mute objects, but, on the contrary in the sense of giving humans — yes
morphing them into —a more realistic shape. Anyway, what a strange
thing it would be to complain about the pitfalls of anthropomorphism
at the time of the anthropocene!

The Earth, this lovely planet, may in fact be the very place where angels fear to tread.

Excerpts from Latour’s Compositional Manifesto

From universalism [compositionism] takes up the task of building a common world; from relativism, the certainty that this common world has to be built from utterly heterogenous parts that will never make a whole, but at best a fragile, revisable, and diverse composite material

 The problem here is that Latour can only see complexity grow toward unification, not toward particularization, more uniqueness. To compose would seem to be to make adequate  relations explicit, without pretending that one has named all the relations– that would be an impossibility. One has to choose.

… the total transformation of what it means to do politics (so as to include non-humans) and what it means to do science (so as to include entangled and controversial and highly disputable matters of concern. … Between belief in Nature and belief in politics, one has to choose.

Is Latour suggesting that there is a reversal of the microcosm and macrososm, such that where once nature was the macrocosmic ground of humans, we are now the macroscopic ground of nature?

Latour starts talking about Whitehead in this manifesto.

Compositionists, however, cannot rely on such a solution. The continuity of all agents in space and time is not given to them as it was to naturalists: they have to compose it, slowly and progressively. And, moreover, to compose if from discontinuous pieces. Not only because human destiny (microcosm) and nonhuman destiny (macrocosm) are now entangled for everyone to see … but for a much deeper reason on which the capture of the creativity of all agencies depends: consequences overwhelm their causes, and this overflow has to be respected everywhere in every domain, in every discipline, and for every type of entity.

Which makes me think of a new definition for the arrow of time, which progresses from the linear (fixed past) to the nonlinear (undetermined future).  Every fixed event (cause) is over-whelmed by the condition of nonlinear indeterminancy which will (eventually) “follow.” There is more consequence in the future than cause in the past. Creative synthesis is a fission, not fusion.

Moderns had never contemplated their future, until a few years back! They were too busy fleeing their past in terror.

Agreed. But what does it mean to “contemplate our future?”

The thirst for the Common World is what there is of communism in compositionism, with this small but crucial difference: that it has to be slowly composed instead of being taken for granted and imposed on all.

Isn’t “the thirst for Common World” the same as “being busy fleeing our past in terror” ?

And isn’t the greatest terror, is that Gaia has SO MUCH AGENCY that she imposes the Common World on us all!!??

Not knowing where the other lectures have to offer, here are some of my guesses as to where Latour is going, after listening to the second lecture.

1. One essential point he said is that scientists seem to fear that foregrounding their activity (mediation) detracts from the validity (legitimacy) of their science. Latour notes that it is only because we are in the period of human inquiry(activity) where the mediated process of knowing is made transparent (by technology and distributed agency) that makes us suspect that mediated (constructed) knowledge is less valid. This is part of why Natural Theology must adopt a Political aspect to reach a Political Natural Theology.
2. Latour is encouraging climate scientists to explicitly “compose a people” by defining the limits of assembly, versus pretending that science (like religion) is a view from nowhere (or everywhere– the god’s eye view) — and that both science(2) as well as religion(2) suffer this compositional angst.
3. The “compositional angst” has shifted the original role of religion (and natural theology) from speaking religiously to speaking about religion — from assembly to conversion.
4. Latour outlines a progression from a premature unification to an ongoing unification to what he is going to advocate as a multiversal rather than a universal.
5. Latour argues that the theos of a unification project, from religion to science worldview, merely substitutes the “all-seeing watchmaker” with “the blind watchmaker” — i.e. the agency is shifted from “god” to “evolution.” I suspect what “the missing piece” is for Latour is the agency of the people who are necessary to mediate the inquiry.
6. In other words, we cannot just discover the “answer” to climate change, by appeal to the “given” answer in nature or of god… that the “answer” , or guiding discourse to action must be mediated by our own assemblages.
7. Is god a spider, architect, or giant vegetable?