La sagesse de l’Oncle Bruno

Bruno Latour [BL] and Nickolaj Schultz [NS], in conversation with Jakob Stein in late 2018, from a transcript (sadly not open-access) at Theory, Culture & Society:

BL: … we are inheriting a history of 200 years of euphemizing and making invisible the material conditions of existence on which we rely. When we see the ecological crisis arriving, we do everything to delay or deny the situation, because we have learned that this was a question outside of our social order. But the fact that the earthly conditions come back and reinsist on being the most important aspect of the social order – which is actually very classical politics, since to have politics you need a land and you need a people – makes us very surprised. So I think it is momentary. It is a transition which is in a way going very fast, since everybody knows now that it is the essential problem. But it is still difficult to fit into the classical definition of politics, because it does not fit with the nation-state, etc. So there are all sorts of characteristics that explain the indifference. There are also theological reasons.

[…]

BL: The place or land where these neo-nationalist countries claim to live has no economic or ecological base. If you see the negotiations between Brussels and Italy, it is clear that the promises made have absolutely no connection with any soil. And the imaginary America of Trump and the imaginary Brazil of Bolsonaro have no land either. It simply has no existence economically or ecologically. And this is why we have to very quickly do the work of reconstituting the land under the feet of people. This is where things can be accelerated and politics can come back. If you ask people ‘What is the territory that allows you to subsist?’, at first, people immediately realize that they have no way of describing this territory and they are completely lost. Afterwards, they feel excited and regrounded. And if they have a ground, a land, a territory, they begin to have interests. And if they have interests, we begin to have politics. So it can and it will shift very quickly. If not, we will all be doomed. Brexit is a good example. What happens in England now is really interesting, because you see how people begin to realize that Brexit is a catastrophe in terms of conditions of existence. You see people who are deeply depoliticized, completely seized by the idea that you need no attachments, suddenly realizing that if you are cut out of Europe then you are nothing much. Because now people are talking concretely: with Brexit, these universities are going to disappear, these jobs are going to disappear, etc., and we have been completely lied to about what it is to be somewhere, in England, in the place of nowhere.

Latour’s latest book, Down to Earth, is literally the work of a lifetime: a distillation of everything he’s done in the past four decades plus into around a hundred short, crackling pages. For most of his career, he has played the distanced sociological role impeccably, but has slowly been shedding it over the last decade or so (or perhaps ever since “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?”); Down to Earth sees him shrug it off completely and make these clean, clear connections to a political project. It’s a masterpiece, full of energy and urgency. You could read it in an afternoon, and I thoroughly recommend that you do so.

Also found this bit from Schultz of great interest:

NS: I am still not sure if I understand why we should not be able to theorize power exerted over future generations. Why should power relations not be able to travel through time? That power relations travel through time – is this not what sociology has always showed with concepts such as ‘social heritage’, ‘social reproduction’, etc? I do not think it takes a lot of metaphysical imagination to realize that our generation and previous generations are dominating and have dominated future generations’ possibilities of breathing and living on habitable soils. Unfortunately, it takes more of an imagination to imagine the opposite. As you say, time is colonized. In this perspective we maybe need to understand that we, the Western, modern civilization, was, is and will be a sort of ‘geo-historical elite’, while future generations, rich as well as poor, Western and non-Western, will be living in our ruins of capitalism, as Anna Tsing would say, as a geo-historical proletariat. It is not a nice thought, but …

Cf. this bit from a while back here at VCTB re: the colonising present, riffing on Deb Chachra. I suppose every generation is given to thinking that its challenges are of world-shattering importance and urgency, but that doesn’t mean they’re wrong.

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