Short remarks on Latour’s final two lectures

I watched the final two of Latour’s Gifford Lectures, which are helpfully arranged and available here. On Latour’s site you can also just download the pdf notes for all of the talks (Or click here to download them). I’ve already posted a few thoughts on the earlier lectures (here, here, and here, for instance).

These last two lectures were also interesting, particularly because Latour’s attempt to ‘face Gaia’ in the Anthropocene leads him to cherry-pick from Carl Schmitt a notion of politics as contests between enemies. I’m not convinced this is all that ecological. Schmitt’s idea that politics originates from the possibility of annihilation, of there being no over-arching set of rules for adjudicating between genuine combatants, is not one I find compelling. It is itself a very modernist idea to think that genuine political possibility proceeds from this basis; and it is odd that Latour does not consider how cooperative exercises are required for contests to happen at all. Call me old fashion, but abandoning to either ‘competition’ or ‘cooperation’ is not an easy fit with ecology. Both happen.

Latour did make a very interesting set of statements about how we may have tried to unite ‘humans’ too quickly under a common banner, and that part of dealing with the Anthropocene will be to step back from globalized ideas of humanity. This isn’t going to sit well with anybody who thinks that self-constituting individuals are what underlie the sovereignty of self-governing societies. Latour didn’t push the line very far on this issue; but he should. It would be a good way to decolonize ideas about autonomy, rationality and so forth. It would also confront some of the incongruity between the Anthropocene and liberalism. On this last topic, an interesting paper by Andrew Dobson came out in Environmental Values yesterday on whether liberalism depends on resource abundance.