Reading :: Facing Gaia

Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime
By Bruno Latour

Last summer I reviewed Latour's Down to Earth, one of the two books he published in English in 2018. This one, Facing Gaia, is the other. Both are oriented to the same problem, which is how to deal with climate change. But whereas Down to Earth was oriented to casual readers, this one is more academic.

Here, Latour argues that the "anthropology of the Moderns" that he has studied throughout his career resonates with the "New Climate Regime": "the physical framework that the Moderns have taken for granted, the ground on which their history has always been played out, has become unstable" (p.3). The result is an ecocrisis in which we should detect "a profound mutation in our relation with the world" (p.8, his emphasis), but we don't: "we receive all this news with astonishing calm," not acting (p.8). The question of why we haven't acted is at the center of the book.

Latour argues that the division between nature and culture is untenable (pp.15-16). Using the figure of Gaia from James Lovelock's Gaia Hypothesis, Latour portrays this figure as a "muddle" that results from a distribution of final causes (p.100), Latour encourages us to follow the actors, the overlapping waves of action that "are the real brush strokes with which [Lovelock] seeks to depict Gaia's face" (p.101).  Gaia is not a whole or superorganism (p.104), and thus we must abandon the distinction between individual and system. This point is critical later in the argument:

When they [social scientists] talk about "society as a whole," "the social context," "globalization," they are drawing a figure with their hands that has never been bigger than an ordinary pumpkin! But the fact is that the problem is the same whether we are talking about Nature, Earth, the Global, Capitalism, or God. Each time, we are presupposing the existence of a superorganism. The passage between connections is immediately replaced by a relation between parts and the Whole, and the latter is said—without much thought—to be necessarily superior to the sum of its parts—whereas it is always necessarily inferior to its parts. Superior does not mean more encompassing; it means more connected. One is never as provincial as when one claims to have a "global view." (p.135, his emphasis)

To interpret this passage, it may help to know that Latour has said that when people talk about "context," they typically make a circle with their hands that starts at the collarbone and ends at the sternum, leading him to think that context is the size and shape of a pumpkin. He also adds a footnote to the end of the paragraph: "There is a confusion between the cartographic globe, which is a way to register as many differences as possible through the simple device of Cartesian coordinates, and the globe of so-called globalization, which is the extension everywhere of as small a set of standard formats as possible" (p.135, footnote 68). That is, Latour is objecting to systematization as a way of simplifying relationships by reducing them to a single manageable frame. He adds in the next paragraph:

Scale is not obtained by successive embeddings of spheres of different sizes—as in the case of Russian dolls—but by the capacity to establish more or less numerous relationships, and especially reciprocal ones. The hard lesson of actor-network theory, according to which there is no reason to confuse a well-connected locality with the utopia of the Globe, holds true for all associations of living beings. (p.136)

This discussion leads Latour (again, as is his wont) to contrast science and religion, which he does through tables: one contrasting two approaches to science and two approaches to religion (p.178) and another that rearranges these columns under the heading of "Natural religions" and "Terrestrialization" (with a science column and a nature column under each) (p.181). (One might suggest that in systematizing science and religion, these tables simplify their relationships by reducing them to a single manageable frame.)

The next lecture is on the end of times. Latour argues here that the certainty of truths from on high is "the exercise of terror" (p.198) and that (quoting Vogelin) the West was the apocalypse for other civilizations (p.205). In trying to determine the date of the Anthropocene, Latour (p.218, footnote 84) embraces a starting date of 1945, not just because that is when we laid down the first radioactive layer from the atom bomb, but also because "it frames exactly the existence of the Baby Boomers." (Latour was born in 1947, and to my knowledge, this is the most Boomer thing he has written.)

And I'm going to wrap things up here. If you've read Latour, especially more recent Latour, I don't think you will encounter many surprises in the second half of the book. He identifies and sharpens differences, then flips and betrays them (as he did with the science-vs-religion tables earlier). He criticizes science and religion in the same terms. He argues that we must carry religion along with us to a new understanding of the world. We must question the distinction between organism and environment and we must emancipate ourselves from the infinite. 

Do you need to pick up this book? No—if you have a casual interest in Latour, I would suggest some of his earlier books, and if you want to understand how Latourean thought can be applied to ecological questions, I would recommend Escobar first. But is it still readable and entertaining? Sure.