Archive Fire: A Summary of Bruno Latour's 'Politics of Nature'

From Bruno Latour's website on his book Politics of Nature (2004):

Summary of the Argument (For Readers in a Hurry . . .)

INTRODUCTION: This book is a work of political philosophy of nature, or political epistemology. It asks what we can do with political ecology. To answer this question, it is not enough to talk about nature and politics; we also have to talk about science. But here is where the shoe pinches: ecologism cannot be simply the introduction of nature into politics, since not only the idea of nature but also the idea of politics, by contrast, both depend on a certain conception of science. Thus we have to reconsider three concepts at once: polis, logos, and phusis.

CHAPTER 1: Why must political ecology let go of nature? Because nature is not a particular sphere of reality but the result of a political division, of a Constitution* that separates what is objective and indisputable from what is subjective and disputable. To do political ecology, then, we must first of all come out of the Cave*, by distinguishing Science* from the practical work of the sciences*. This distinction allows us to make another one, between the official philosophy of ecologism on the one hand and its burgeoning practice on the other. Whereas ecology is assimilated to questions concerning nature, in practice it focuses on imbroglios involving sciences, moralities, law, and politics. As a result, ecologism bears not on crises of nature but on crises of objectivity. If nature* is a particular way of totalizing the members who share the same common world instead of and in place of politics, we understand easily why ecologism marks the end of nature in politics and why we cannot accept the traditional term “nature,” which was invented in order to reduce public life to a rump parliament. To be sure, the idea that the Western notion of nature is a historically situated social representation* has become a commonplace. But we cannot settle for it without maintaining the politics of the Cave, since doing so would amount to distancing ourselves still further from the reality of things themselves left intact in the hands of Science.

To give political ecology its place, we must then avoid the shoals of representations of nature and accept the risk of metaphysics. Fortunately, for this task we can profit from the fragile aid of comparative anthropology. Indeed, no culture except that of the West has used nature to organize its political life. Traditional societies do not live in harmony with nature; they are unacquainted with it. Thanks to the sociology of the sciences, to the practice of ecologism, to anthropology, we can thus understand that nature is only one of the two houses of a collective* instituted to paralyze democracy. The key question of political ecology can now be formulated: can we find a successor to the collective with two houses: nature and society*?

CHAPTER 2: Once nature has been set aside, another question arises—how to bring together the collective—that is heir to the old nature and the old society. We cannot simply bring objects* and subjects* together, since the division between nature and society is not made in such a way that we can get beyond it. In order to get ourselves out of these difficulties in composing the collective, we have to consider that the collective is made up of humans and nonhumans capable of being seated as citizens, provided that we proceed to apportion capacities. The first of these consists in redistributing speech between humans and nonhumans while learning to be skeptical of all spokespersons—those who represent humans as well as those who represent nonhumans. The second apportionment consists in redistributing the capacity to act as a social actor while considering only associations of humans and nonhumans. It is on these associations and not on nature that ecology must focus. This does not mean that the citizens of the collective belong to language or to the social realm since, by a third apportionment, the sctors are also defined by reality and recalcitrance. The set of three apportionments allows us to define the collective as composed of propositions*. To convene the collective, we shall thus no longer be interested in nature and society, but only in knowing whether the propositions that compose it are more or less well articulated. The collective finally convened allows a return to civil peace, by redefining politics as the progressive composition of a good common world*.

CHAPTER 3: Do we not find again the same confusion with the collective as with the abandoned notion of nature, namely, premature unification? In order to avoid this risk, we are going to seek a new separation of powers that makes it possible to redifferentiate the collective. It is impossible, of course, to go back to the old separation between facts and values, for that separation has only disadvantages, even though it seems indispensable to public order. To speak about “facts” amounts to mixing a morality that is impotent in the face of established facts with a hierarchy of priorities that no longer has the right to eliminate any fact. It paralyzes both sciences and morality.

We restore order to these assemblies if we distinguish two other powers: the power to take into account, and the power to put in order. The first power is going to retain from facts the requirement of perplexity*, and from values the requirement of consultation*. The second is going to recuperate from values the requirement of hierarchy*, and from facts the requirement of institution*. In place of the impossible distinction between facts and values, we are thus going to have two powers of representation of the collective that are at once distinct and complementary. While the fact/value distinction appeared reassuring, it did not allow us to maintain the essential guarantees that the new Constitution requires by inventing a State of law for propositions. The collective no longer construes itself as a society in a single nature, for it creates a new exteriority defined as the totality of what it has excluded by the power of putting in order and which obliges the power of taking into account to go back to work. The dynamics of the progressive composition of the common world thus differ as much from the politics of humans as from that of nature under the old Constitution.

CHAPTER 4: It now becomes possible to define the competencies of the collective, provided that we first avoid the quarrel of the two ecopolitics, which would confuse political ecology with political economics. If economics presents itself as the summing-up of the collective, it usurps the functions of political ecology and paralyzes science, morality, and politics simultaneously, by imposing a third form of naturalization. But once it has been emptied of its political pretensions, it becomes a profession indispensable to the functions of the new Constitution, and each of its members brings, through the intermediary of individual skill, an individual contribution to the furnishing of the houses. The contribution of the sciences is going to be much more important than that of Science* since it will bear on all the functions at once: perplexity*, consultation*, hierarchy*, and institution*, to which we must add the maintenance of the separation of powers* and the scenarization of the whole*. The big difference is that the politicians’ contribution is going to bear on the same six tasks, thus permitting a synergy that was impossible earlier when Science was concerned with nature and politics with interests. These functions are going to become all the more realizable in that the contribution of the economists and then that of the moralists will be added, defining a common construction site that takes the place of the impossible political body of the past.

Thanks to this new organization, the dynamics of the collective is becoming clear. It rests on the work of the two houses, of which one, the upper house, represents the power to take into account* and the other, the lower house, represents the power to arrange in rank order*. Reception by the upper house has nothing to do with the old triage between nature and society: it is based on two investigations, the first undertaken to satisfy the requirement of perplexity and the other to satisfy the requirement of consultation. If this first assembly has done a good job, it makes reception by the lower house much more difficult because each proposition has become incommensurable with the common world already collected. And yet it is here that the investigation into the hierarchies* that are compatible among themselves must begin, along with the investigation into the common designation of the enemy* whose exclusion will be instituted by the lower house during an explicit procedure. This succession of stages makes it possible to define a common house, a State of law in the reception of propositions, which finally makes the sciences compatible with democracy.

CHAPTER 5: A collective whose dynamics has just been thus redefined no longer finds itself facing the alternative between a single nature and multiple cultures. It is thus going to have to reopen the question of the number of collectives by exploring the common worlds. But it can only begin this exploration if it abandons the definition of progress. There are in fact not one but two arrows of time; the first one, modernist*, goes toward an ever-increasing separation between objectivity and subjectivity, and the other, nonmodern, goes toward ever more intricate attachments. Only the second makes it possible to define the collective by its learning curve. Provided that we add to the two preceding powers a third power, the power to follow up, which brings up anew the question of the state. The State of political ecology remains to be invented, since it is no longer based on any transcendence but on the quality of follow-up in the collective experimentation. It is on this quality, the art of governing without mastery, that civilization* capable of putting an end to the state of war depends. But to make peace possible, we still need to benefit from the exercise of diplomacy. The diplomat renews contact with the others, but without making further use of the division between mononaturalism* and multiculturalism*. The success of diplomacy will determine whether the sciences are at war or at peace.

CONCLUSION:

a) Since politics has always been conducted under the auspices of nature, we have never left the state of nature behind, and the Leviathan remains to be constructed.

b) A first style of political ecology believed it was innovating by inserting nature into politics, whereas in fact it was only exacerbating the paralysis of politics caused by the old nature.

c) To give new meaning to political ecology, we need to abandon Science in favor of the sciences conceived as ways of socializing nonhumans, and we have to abandon the politics of the Cave for politics defined by the progressive composition of the good common world*.

d) All the institutions that allow for this new political ecology already exist in tentative form in contemporary reality, even if we shall have to redefine the positions of left and right.

e) To the famous question “What Is to Be Done?” there is only one answer: “Political ecology!” —provided that we modify the meaning of the word by giving it the experimental metaphysics* that is in keeping with its ambitions.