Copyright page

First published in French as Face à Gaïa. Huit conférences sur le nouveau régime climatique © Éditions La Découverte, Paris, 2015.

The right of Bruno Latour to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

23 words from p. 186 of James Lovelock, Gaia: The Practical Science of Planetary Medicine (2001) used as an epigraph. © Gaia Books Ltd. By permission of Oxford University Press, USA.

First published in English in 2017 by Polity Press

Polity Press

65 Bridge Street

Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press

101 Station Landing

Suite 300,

Medford, MA 02155

USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-8433-8

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-8434-5 (pb)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Latour, Bruno, author.

Title: Facing Gaia : eight lectures on the new climatic regime / Bruno Latour.

Description: Cambridge, UK ; Malden, MA : Polity, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Classification: LCC QH331 (ebook) | LCC QH331 .L3313 2017 (print) | DDC 570.1–dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016057696

Typeset in 10.5 on 12 pt Sabon

by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited

Printed and bound in the UK by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.

Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.

For further information on Polity, visit our website:

politybooks.com

Introduction

It all began with the idea of a dance movement that captured my attention, some ten years ago. I couldn't shake it off. A dancer is rushing backwards to get away from something she must have found frightening; as she runs, she keeps glancing back more and more anxiously, as if her flight is accumulating obstacles behind her that increasingly impede her movements, until she is forced to turn around. And there she stands, suspended, frozen, her arms hanging loosely, looking at something coming towards her, something even more terrifying than what she was first seeking to escape – until she is forced to recoil. Fleeing from one horror, she has met another, partly created by her flight.

cintro-fig-0001 — Figure 0.1 Still from the dance “The Angel of Geostory,” by Stéphanie Ganachaud, filmed by Jonathan Michel, February 12, 2013.

I became convinced that this dance expressed the spirit of the times, that it summed up in a single situation, one very disturbing to me, the one the Moderns had first fled – the archaic horror of the past – and what they had to face today – the emergence of an enigmatic figure, the source of a horror that was now in front of them rather than behind. I had first noted the emergence of this monster, half cyclone, half Leviathan, under an odd name: “Cosmocolossus.”¹ The figure merged very quickly in my mind with another highly controversial figure that I had been thinking about as I read James Lovelock: the figure of Gaia. Now, I could no longer escape: I needed to understand what was coming at me in the harrowing form of a force that was at once mythical, scientific, political, and probably religious as well.

Since I knew nothing about dance, it took me several years to find, in Stéphanie Ganachaud, the ideal interpreter of this brief movement.² Meanwhile, not knowing what to do with the obsessional figure of the Cosmocolossus, I persuaded some close friends to create a play about it, which has since become the Gaia Global Circus.³ It was at this point, in one of those coincidences that shouldn't surprise anyone who has been gripped by an obsession, that the Gifford Lecture committee asked me to come to Edinburgh in 2013 to give a series of six talks under the intriguing heading of “natural religion.” How could I resist an offer that William James, Alfred North Whitehead, John Dewey, Henri Bergson, Hannah Arendt, and many others had accepted?⁴ Wasn't this the ideal opportunity to develop through argument what dance and theater had first compelled me to explore? At least this medium wasn't too foreign to me, especially since I had just finished writing an inquiry into the modes of existence that turned out to be under the more and more pervasive shadow of Gaia.⁵ These lectures, reworked, expanded, and completely rewritten, are the basis for the present book.

If I retain the genre, style, and tone of the lectures in publishing them, it is because the anthropology of the Moderns that I have been pursuing for forty years turns out to resonate increasingly with what can be called the New Climate Regime.⁶ I use this term to summarize the present situation, in which the physical framework that the Moderns had taken for granted, the ground on which their history had always been played out, has become unstable. As if the décor had gotten up on stage to share the drama with the actors. From this moment on, everything changes in the way stories are told, so much so that the political order now includes everything that previously belonged to nature – a figure that, in an ongoing backlash effect, becomes an ever more undecipherable enigma.

For years, my colleagues and I tried to come to grips with this intrusion of nature and the sciences into politics; we developed a number of methods for following and even mapping ecological controversies. But all this specialized work never succeeded in shaking the certainties of those who continued to imagine a social world without objects set off against a natural world without humans – and without scientists seeking to know that world. While we were trying to unravel some of the knots of epistemology and sociology, the whole edifice that had distributed the functions of these fields was falling to the ground – or, rather, was falling, literally, back down to Earth. We were still discussing possible links between humans and nonhumans, while in the meantime scientists were inventing a multitude of ways to talk about the same thing, but on a completely different scale: the “Anthropocene,” the “great acceleration,” “planetary limits,” “geohistory,” “tipping points,” “critical zones,” all these astonishing terms that we shall encounter as we go along, terms that scientists had to invent in their attempt to understand this Earth that seems to react to our actions.

My original discipline, science studies, finds itself reinforced today by the widely accepted understanding that the old constitution, the one that distributed powers between science and politics, has become obsolete. As if we had really passed from an Old Regime to a new one marked by the emergence in multiple forms of the question of climates and, even more strangely, of their link to government. I am using these terms (which historians of geography have generally abandoned except with reference to Montesquieu's “climate theory,” itself long since deemed obsolete) in their broadest sense. All a sudden, everyone senses that another Spirit of the Laws of Nature⁷ is in the process of emerging and that we had better start writing it down if we want to survive the forces unleashed by the New Regime. The present volume seeks to contribute to this collective work of exploration.

Gaia is presented here as the occasion for a return to Earth that allows for a differentiated version of the respective qualities that can be required of sciences, politics, and religions, as these are finally reduced to more modest and more earthbound definitions of their former vocations. The lectures come in pairs. The first two deal with the notion of agency (in the sense of “power to act”), an indispensable concept for allowing exchanges between heretofore distinct fields and disciplines; the next two introduce the principal characters – first Gaia, then the Anthropocene; the fifth and sixth lectures define the peoples who are struggling to occupy the Earth and the epoch in which they find themselves; and the last two explore the geopolitical question of the territories involved in the struggle.

The potential audience for a book is even more difficult to pin down than the audience for a lecture, but, since we have actually entered a period of history that is at once geological and human, I would like to address readers with diverse skills. It is impossible to understand what is happening to us without turning to the sciences – the sciences have been the first to sound the alarm. And yet, to understand them, it is impossible to settle for the image offered by the old epistemology; the sciences are now and will remain from now on so intermingled with the entire culture that we need to turn to the humanities to understand how they really function. Hence a hybrid style for a hybrid subject addressed to a necessarily hybrid audience.

Such a book is hybrid in its composition, too, as you might imagine. Once the six Gifford Lectures had been drafted for delivery in Edinburgh in February 2013, they were translated into French by Franck Lemonde, along with another talk given in 2013.⁸ But then I put the text through what translators hate most when they have the misfortune of needing to translate into an author's mother tongue: I thoroughly modified the French version and added two new chapters, reshaping it to such an extent that it is an entirely different text, now translated once more for publication in English. The English version differs from the French only in some footnotes, several of the works cited, and a few cosmetic changes.

If writers can flatter themselves that their readers are the same from the beginning to the end of a book, and that these readers will be learning as they proceed from chapter to chapter, the same cannot be said for speakers, who must address a partly different audience every time. That is why each of the eight lectures can be read on its own and they can be perused in any order. The more specialized points have been shifted to the notes.

I owe thanks to too many people to name them all here; I attempt to acknowledge my debt, instead, in the bibliographical references.

Still, it would be unfair not to cite first and foremost the members of the Gifford Lecture committee, who allowed me to address the theme of “natural religion,” without forgetting the audience in the Santa Cecilia Room during those six marvelous days in February 2013 in sun-drenched Edinburgh.

It is thanks to Isabelle Stengers that I first became interested in what she has called the intrusion of Gaia, and it was as usual by going to Simon Schaffer for help that I tried to sort out Gaia's impossible character, sharing my anxieties with Clive Hamilton, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Déborah Danowski, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Donna Haraway, Bronislaw Szerzynski, and many other colleagues.

But I would like to offer special thanks to Jérôme Gaillardet and Jan Zalasiewicz, who confirmed for me that there has been, since the Anthropocene, a common ground for the natural sciences and the humanities that we all share.

I unquestionably owe much more than they imagine to the students who created and produced Make it Work at the Théâtre des Amandiers in Nanterre in May 2015; I am equally indebted to the creators of the Anthropocene Monument exhibit at the Abattoirs museum in Toulouse in October 2014, as well as to the students in the course titled “Political Philosophy of Nature.”

Finally, I want to thank Philippe Pignarre, whose editorial work has supported me for a very long time. I don't think he has ever published a book that makes such direct reference to the name of his collection⁹ – because, contrary to what people too often think, Gaia is actually not global at all. Gaia is unquestionably the great empêcheur de penser en rond, the grand inhibitor of circular thinking, a great impetus to thinking outside the box…¹⁰

Dedication

Copyright page

Introduction

Notes