Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime PDF

Facing Gaia For Ulysse and Maya  Facing Gaia Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime Bruno Latour Translated by Catherine Porter polity First published in French as Face à Gaïa. Huit conférences sur le nouveau régime climatique © Éditions La Découverte, Paris, 2015. This ed...

Facing Gaia For Ulysse and Maya  Facing Gaia Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime Bruno Latour Translated by Catherine Porter polity First published in French as Face à Gaïa. Huit conférences sur le nouveau régime climatique © Éditions La Découverte, Paris, 2015. This edition copyright © Bruno Latour 2017 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. Identifiers: LCCN 2016057696 (print) | LCCN 2017022305 (ebook) | ISBN 9780745684369 (Mobi) | ISBN 9780745684376 (Epub) | ISBN 9780745684338 (hardback) | ISBN 9780745684345 (paperback) Subjects: LCSH: Gaia hypothesis. | Philosophy of nature. | Nature in literature. | Climatic changes–Philosophy. | Philosophical anthropology. | Nature–Effect of human beings on. | BISAC: SCIENCE / Philosophy & Social Aspects. 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. 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For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com  Contents Introduction 1 First Lecture: On the instability of the (notion of) nature 7 A mutation of the relation to the world Four ways to be driven crazy by ecology The instability of the nature/ culture relation The invocation of human nature The recourse to the “natural world” On a great service rendered by the pseudo-controversy over the climate “Go tell your masters that the scientists are on the warpath!” In which we seek to pass from “nature” to the world How to face up Second Lecture: How not to (de-)animate nature 41 Disturbing “truths” Describing in order to warn In which we concentrate on agency On the difficulty of distinguishing between humans and nonhumans “And yet it moves!” A new version of natural law On an unfortunate tendency to confuse cause and creation Toward a nature that would no longer be a religion? Third Lecture: Gaia, a (finally secular) figure for nature 75 Galileo, Lovelock: two symmetrical discoveries Gaia, an exceedingly treacherous mythical name for a scientific theory A parallel with Pasteur’s microbes Lovelock too makes micro-actors proliferate How to avoid the idea of a system? Organisms make their own environment, they do not adapt to it On a slight complication of Darwinism Space, an offspring of history vi Contents Fourth Lecture: The Anthropocene and the destruction of (the image of) the Globe 111 The Anthropocene: an innovation Mente et Malleo A debatable term for an uncertain epoch An ideal opportunity to disaggregate the figures of Man and Nature Sloterdijk, or the theological origin of the image of the Sphere Confusion between Science and the Globe Tyrrell against Lovelock Feedback loops do not draw a Globe Finally, a different principle of composition Melancholia, or the end of the Globe Fifth Lecture: How to convene the various peoples (of nature)? 146 Two Leviathans, two cosmologies How to avoid war between the gods? A perilous diplomatic project The impossible convocation of a “people of nature” How to give negotiation a chance? On the conflict between science and religion Uncertainty about the meaning of the word “end” Comparing collectives in combat Doing without any natural religion Sixth Lecture: How (not) to put an end to the end of times? 184 The fateful date of 1610 Stephen Toulmin and the scientific counter-revolution In search of the religious origin of “disinhibition” The strange project of achieving Paradise on Earth Eric Voegelin and the avatars of Gnosticism On an apocalyptic origin of climate skepticism From the religious to the terrestrial by way of the secular A “people of Gaia”? How to respond when accused of producing “apocalyptic discourse” Seventh Lecture: The States (of Nature) between war and peace 220 The “Great Enclosure” of Caspar David Friedrich The end of the State of Nature On the proper dosage of Carl Schmitt “We seek to understand the normative order of the Earth” On the difference between war and police work How to turn around and face Gaia? Human versus Earthbound Learning to identify the struggling territories  Contents vii Eighth Lecture: How to govern struggling (natural) territories? 255 In the Theater of Negotiations, Les Amandiers, May 2015 Learning to meet without a higher arbiter Extension of the Conference of the Parties to Nonhumans Multiplication of the parties involved Mapping the critical zones Rediscovering the meaning of the State Laudato Sí Finally, facing Gaia “Land ho!” References 293 Index 315 “In mythical language, the earth became known as mother of law... This is what the poet means when he speaks of the infinitely just earth: justissima tellus.” Carl Schmitt The Nomos of the Earth, 42 “It is no longer politics sans phrase that is destiny, but rather climate politics.” Peter Sloterdijk Spheres, vol. 2, Globes, 333 “I would sooner expect to see a goat to succeed as a gardener than expect humans to become responsible stewards of the Earth.” James Lovelock Gaia: The Practical Science of Planetary Medicine, 186 “Nature is but a name for excess.” William James A Pluralistic Universe, 148  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. Figure 0.1 Still from the dance “The Angel of Geostory,” by Stéphanie Ganachaud, filmed by Jonathan Michel, February 12, 2013. 2 Introduction 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 argu- ment 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 1 See Bruno Latour, Kosmokoloss (2013d), a radio play broadcast in Germany (in German). The text of the play and most of my own articles cited in this book are accessible in their final or provisional versions at www.bruno-latour.fr. 2 The movement was performed on February 12, 2013, and filmed by Jonathan Michel; see www.vimeo.com/60064456. 3 A collective project carried out starting in the spring of 2010 with Chloë Latour and Frédérique Aït-Touati, directors, and Claire Astruc, Jade Collinet, Matthieu Protin, and Luigi Cerri, actors. Pierre Daubigny wrote the text, Gaia Global Circus, which led to performances in Toulouse in the context of the Novela, a festival celebrat- ing new knowledge and culture, in October 2013, and in Reims at the Comédie in December of the same year, before the cast went on tour in France and abroad. 4 The six talks are available on video at the site of the Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh and in text form on my website (2013c). On the history of these lectures, and on the field of “natural religion,” a rather enigmatic term, see Larry Witham, The Measure of God (2005).  Introduction 3 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 summa- rize 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 intru- sion 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 certain- ties of those who continued to imagine a social world without objects set off against a natural world without humans – and without sci- entists 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 5 Bruno Latour, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns ( 2013b). 6 The expression is derived from the term “climatic regime” introduced by Stefan Aykut and Amy Dahan, in Gouverner le climat? Vingt ans de négociations interna- tionales (2014), to designate a very particular and, in their view, not very effective way to try to “govern the climate” as if CO2 were another case of pollution. Their work, unfortunately not translated, plays an important role in the present book. 4 Introduction 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 indispensa- ble 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 7 Trans.: This imagined title refers to a work on political theory by Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws ( 1989). 8 The second lecture includes parts of my “Agency at the Time of the Anthropocene” (2014a).  Introduction 5 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 char- acter, 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 stu- dents 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 6 Introduction 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 9 Trans.: Les empêcheurs de penser en rond is the name of a publishing house founded by Philippe Pignarre in 1989, taken over as a collection devoted to the humanities and social sciences by Seuil in 2000 and then by La Découverte in 2008. The term plays on the familiar French expression empêcheur de tourner en rond, literally someone who interferes with a smoothly running operation, metaphorically someone who “throws sand in the gears,” a “spoilsport,” a “killjoy,” a “party pooper.” 10 The very important doctoral thesis by Sébastien Dutreuil, “Gaïa: hypothèse, pro- gramme de recherche pour le système terre, ou philosophie de la nature?,” defended in 2016 at Université de Paris I, was completed too late for me to use it in his book. Once published, it will significantly renew the history of Lovelock and Gaia and their place in earth science.  FIRST LECTURE On the instability of the (notion of) nature A mutation of the relation to the world Four ways to be driven crazy by ecology The instability of the nature/culture relation The invocation of human nature The recourse to the “natural world” On a great service rendered by the pseudo-controversy over the climate “Go tell your masters that the scientists are on the warpath!” In which we seek to pass from “nature” to the world How to face up It doesn’t stop; every morning it begins all over again. One day, it’s rising water levels; the next, it’s soil erosion; by evening, it’s the gla- ciers melting faster and faster; on the 8 p.m. news, between two reports on war crimes, we learn that thousands of species are about to disappear before they have even been properly identified. Every month, the measurements of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are even worse than the unemployment statistics. Every year, we are told that it is the hottest since the first weather recording stations were set up; sea levels keep on rising; the coastline is increasingly threatened by spring storms; as for the ocean, every new study finds it more acidic than before. This is what the press calls living in the era of an “ecological crisis.” Alas, talking about a “crisis” would be just another way of reas- suring ourselves, saying that “this too will pass,” the crisis “will soon be behind us.” If only it were just a crisis! If only it had been just a 8 First Lecture crisis! The experts tell us we should be talking instead about a “muta- tion”: we were used to one world; we are now tipping, mutating, into another. As for the adjective “ecological,” we use that word for reas- surance as well, all too often, as a way of distancing ourselves from the troubles with which we’re threatened: “Ah, if you’re talking about ecological questions, fine! They don’t really concern us, of course.” We behave just like people in the twentieth century when they talked about “the environment,” using that term to designate the beings of nature considered from afar, through the shelter of bay windows. But today, according to the experts, all of us are affected, on the inside, in the intimacy of our precious little existences, by these news bulletins that warn us directly about what we ought to eat and drink, about our land use, our modes of transportation, our clothing choices. As we hear one piece of bad news after another, you might expect us to feel that we had shifted from a mere ecological crisis into what should instead be called a profound mutation in our relation to the world. And yet this is surely not the case. For we receive all this news with astonishing calm, even with an admirable form of stoicism. If a radical mutation were really at issue, we would all have already modi- fied the bases of our existence from top to bottom. We would have begun to change our food, our habitats, our means of transportation, our cultural technologies, in short, our mode of production. Every time we heard the sirens we would have rushed out of our shelters to invent new technologies equal to the threat. The inhabitants of the wealthy countries would have been as inventive as they were earlier in times of war, and, as they did in the twentieth century, they would have solved the problem in four or five years, by a massive transfor- mation of their ways of life. Thanks to their vigorous actions, the quantity of CO2 captured at the Mauna Loa observatory in Hawaii would already be starting to stabilize;1 well-watered soil would be swarming with earthworms, and the sea, rich in plankton, would again be full of fish; even the Arctic ice might have slowed its decline (unless it has been on an irreversible slope, shifting for millennia toward a new state).2 In any case, we would already have acted. Beginning some thirty years ago, the crisis would already be over. We would be looking back at the era of “the great ecological war” with the pride of people who 1 This observatory has been providing measurements of atmospheric CO2 longer than any other. On the history of these measurements, see Charles David Keeling, “Rewards and Penalties of Recording the Earth” (1998). I shall come back to this example a number of times. 2 See David Archer, The Long Thaw (2010b).  On the instability of the (notion of) nature 9 had nearly succumbed, but who had figured out how to turn the situ- ation around to their advantage by reacting rapidly and mobilizing the totality of their powers of invention. We might even be taking our grandchildren to visit museums devoted to this struggle, hoping that they would be as stunned by our progress as they are today when they see how the Second World War gave rise to the Manhattan Project, the refinement of penicillin, and the dramatic progress of radar and air travel. But here we are: what could have been just a passing crisis has turned into a profound alteration of our relation to the world. It seems as though we have become the people who could have acted thirty or forty years ago – and who did nothing, or far too little.3 A strange situation: we crossed a series of thresholds, we went through total war, and we hardly noticed a thing! So that now we’re bending under the weight of a gigantic event that has crept up on us behind our backs without our really realizing it, without our putting up a fight. Just imagine: hidden behind the profusion of world wars, colonial wars, and nuclear threats, there was, in the twentieth century, that “classic century of war,” another war, also worldwide, also total, also colo- nial, that we lived through without experiencing it. Whereas we are now preparing ourselves quite nonchalantly to take an interest in the fate of “future generations” (as they used to say), just imagine what it would be like if everything had already been done by the previous generations! Just imagine that something has happened that is not ahead of us, as a threat to come, but rather behind us, behind those who have already been born. How can we not feel rather ashamed that we have made a situation irreversible because we moved along like sleepwalkers when the alarms sounded? And yet we haven’t lacked for warnings. The sirens have been blaring all along. Awareness of ecological disasters has been long- standing, active, supported by arguments, documentation, proofs, from the very beginning of what is called the “industrial era” or the “machine age.” We can’t say that we didn’t know.4 It’s just that there are many ways of knowing and not knowing at the same time. Usually, when it’s a question of paying attention to oneself, to one’s own survival, to the well-being of those we care about, we tend rather 3 This is the object of the frightening little exercise in science fiction produced by historian of science Naomi Oreskes and her colleague Erik M. Conway, The Collapse of American Civilization: A View from the Future (2014). 4 This is the theme addressed by Jean-Baptiste Fressoz in his important book L’apocalypse joyeuse: une histoire du risque technologique (2012), and again in Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, eds, The Shock of the Anthropocene: The Earth, History, and Us (2016). 10 First Lecture to err in the direction of security: when our children have the sniffles, we check with the pediatrician; at the slightest threat to our plantings, we call for insecticide; if there is any doubt about the safety of our property, we take out insurance and install surveillance cameras; to prevent a potential invasion, we assemble armies at our borders. The overly celebrated precautionary principle is applied abundantly as soon as it is a matter of protecting our surroundings and our belong- ings, even if we are not too sure about the diagnosis and even if the experts are still quibbling about the scope of the dangers.5 Now, for this worldwide crisis, no one invokes the precautionary principle in order to plunge bravely into action. This time, our very old, cautious, tentative humanity, which usually advances only by groping, tapping each obstacle with its white cane like a blind person, making careful adjustments at every sign of risk, pulling back as soon as it feels resist- ance, rushing ahead as soon as the horizon opens up before hesitat- ing once again as soon as a new obstacle appears, this humanity has remained impassive. None of its old peasant, bourgeois, artisanal, working-class, political virtues seem to come into play here. The alarms have sounded; they’ve been disconnected one after another. People have opened their eyes, they have seen, they have known, and they have forged straight ahead with their eyes shut tight!6 If we are astonished, reading Christopher Clark’s The Sleepwalkers, to see Europe in 1914 hurtling toward the Great War with its eyes wide open,7 how can we not be astonished to learn retrospectively with what precise knowledge of the causes and effects Europeans (and all those that have followed the same path since) have rushed headlong into this other Great War about which we are learning, stunned, that it has already taken place – and that we have probably lost it? * “An alteration of the relation to the world”: this is the scholarly term for madness. We understand nothing about ecological mutations if we 5 The precautionary principle is often misinterpreted: it is a question not of abstaining from action when one is uncertain but, on the contrary, of acting even when one does not have complete certainty: “Better to be safe than sorry.” It is a principle of action and research and not, as its enemies would have it, a principle of obscurantism. 6 This is why, in L’apocalypse joyeuse, Fressoz uses the term “disinhibition”: “The word disinhibition condenses the two phases of moving into action: that of reflexivity and that of going beyond; that of taking danger into account and that of normal- izing danger. Modernity was a process of reflexive disinhibition... ” (p. 16). In the sixth lecture, I shall look more closely at this term in search of its religious origin. 7 Christopher M. Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 (2013).  On the instability of the (notion of) nature 11 don’t measure the extent to which they throw everyone into a panic. Even if they have several different ways of driving us crazy! One segment of the public – some intellectuals, some journalists, helped occasionally by certain experts – has decided to plunge little by little into a parallel world in which there is no longer either any agitated nature or any real threat. If they remain calm, it is because they are sure that scientific data have been manipulated by dark forces or, in any case, have been so exaggerated that we must courageously resist the opinions of those whom they call “catastrophists”; we must learn, as they say, “to keep our heads” and go on living as before, without worrying too much. This madness sometimes takes on fanati- cal form, as it does with the so-called climate skeptics – and even sometimes “climate deniers” – who adhere in varying degrees to a conspiracy theory and who, like many elected American officials, see in the issue of ecology a devious way of imposing socialism on the United States!8 This view is much more widespread in the world at large, however, in the form of a low-level madness that can be char- acterized as quietist, with reference to a religious tradition in which the faithful trusted in God to take care of their salvation. Climate quietists, like the others, live in a parallel universe, but, because they have disconnected all the alarms, no strident announcement forces them up from the soft pillow of doubt: “We’ll wait and see. The climate has always varied. Humanity has always come through. We have other things to worry about. The important thing is to wait, and above all not to panic.” A strange diagnosis: these people are crazy by dint of staying calm! Some of them don’t even hesitate to stand up in a political meeting and invoke the covenant in Genesis where God promises Noah that He will send no more floods: “Never again will I curse the ground because of man, even though every inclination of his heart is evil from childhood, and never again will I destroy all living creatures, as I have done” (Gen. 8: 21).9 With such solid assurance, it would be wrong indeed to worry! Others, fortunately fewer in number, have heard the warning sirens but have reacted with such panic that they have plunged into a differ- 8 There is now an abundant literature on the origins of climate skepticism, starting with the classic book by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming (2010). This phenomenon occupies an important place in my own study, and I shall come back to it often in these lectures. 9 Cited by Congressman John Shimkus of Illinois on March 25, 2009, during a meeting of the United States Energy Subcommittee on Environment and Economy; see Shawn Lawrence Otto, Fool Me Twice: Fighting the Assault on Science in America (2011), p. 295. 12 First Lecture ent frenzy: “Since the threats are so serious and the transformations we have caused in the planet are so radical,” they argue, “let’s come to grips with the entire terrestrial system, which we can conceive as a vast machine that has stopped working properly only because we have not controlled it completely enough.” And there they are, seized by a new urge for total domination over a nature always perceived as recalcitrant and wild. In the great delirium that they call, modestly, geo-engineering, they mean to embrace the Earth as a whole.10 To recover from the nightmares of the past, they propose to increase still further the dosage of megalomania needed for survival in this world, which in their eyes has become a clinic for patients with frayed nerves. Modernization has led us into an impasse? Let’s be even more resolutely modern! If the members of the first group of climate skep- tics have to be shaken up to keep them from sleeping, those in this second group need to be strait-jacketed to keep them from doing too many foolish things.11 How can we begin to list all the nuances of depression that strike a third group of people, much more numerous, who carefully observe the rapid transformations of the Earth and who have decided that these can neither be ignored nor, alas, be remedied by any radical measures? Sadness, the blues, melancholia, neurasthenia? Yes, they’ve lost their nerve, their throats are tightening; they can hardly bring themselves to read a newspaper; they’re stirred from their lethargy only by their rage at seeing others even crazier than they are. But once this fit of anger has subsided, they end up prostrate under huge doses of antidepressants. The craziest of all are those who appear to believe that they can do something despite the odds, that it isn’t too late, that the rules of collective action are surely going to work here again, that one has to be able to act rationally, with eyes wide open, even in the face of threats as serious as these, while respecting the framework of existing institutions.12 But the people in this group are probably bipolar, full of energy in the manic phase, before the letdown that gives them a terrible urge to jump out of the window – or to toss their adversaries out instead. 10 In Clive Hamilton’s book Earthmasters: The Dawn of Climate Engineering (2013), the presentation of the solutions proposed is enough to make one’s hair stand on end. 11 In The Planet Remade: How Geoengineering Could Change the World (2015), Oliver Morton tries to draw a fine line between hubris and sanity. 12 This is what Stefan Aykut and Amy Dahan, in Gouverner le climat? (2014), call the “denial of reality” on the part of international organizations; they analyze the negotiation procedure that has worked to limit certain instances of pollution as it is applied to a much thornier problem.  On the instability of the (notion of) nature 13 Are there still a few people left who are able to escape these symp- toms? Yes, but don’t think for a moment that that means they’re of sound mind! They are most likely artists, hermits, gardeners, explor- ers, activists, or naturalists, looking in near total isolation for other ways of resisting anguish: esperados, to use Romain Gary’s humorous label13 (unless they are like me, and manage to shed their anguish only because they have found clever ways to induce it in others!). No doubt about it, ecology drives people crazy; this has to be our point of departure – not with the goal of finding a cure, just so we can learn to survive without getting carried away by denial, or hubris, or depression, or hope for a reasonable solution, or retreat into the desert. There is no cure for the condition of belonging to the world. But, by taking care, we can cure ourselves of believing that we do not belong to it, that the essential question lies elsewhere, that what happens to the world does not concern us. The time is past for hoping to “get through it.” We are indeed, as they say, “in a tunnel,” except that we won’t see light at the end. In these matters, hope is a bad counselor, since we are not in a crisis. We can no longer say “this, too, will pass.” We’re going to have to get used to it. It’s definitive. The imperative confronting us, therefore, is to discover a course of treatment – but without the illusion that a cure will come quickly. In this sense, it would not be impossible to make progress, but it would be progress in reverse: this would mean rethinking the idea of progress, retrogressing, discovering a different way of experiencing the passage of time. Instead of speaking of hope, we would have to explore a rather subtle way of “dis-hoping”; this doesn’t mean “despairing” but, rather, not trusting in hope alone as a way of engag- ing with passing time.14 The hope of no longer counting on hope? Admittedly, that doesn’t sound very encouraging. 13 Romain Gary, interview by Pierre Dumayet, in Lecture pour tous, December 19, 1956. For me, the model is George Monbiot, a journalist with The Guardian whose blog (www.monbiot.com) is as depressing as it is invigorating, but also Gilles Clément, a “planetary gardener,” a renowned landscape architect who has held a chair in artistic creation at the Collège de France. 14 The relation to hope is the object of Clive Hamilton’s book Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth about Climate Change (2010). I shall come back to it in the fifth and sixth lectures when we approach the question of the “end time.” The link between paradoxical temporality and ecology is explored by Jean-Pierre Dupuy in Pour un catastrophisme éclairé: quand l’impossible est certain (2003); see also Dupuy’s interview, “On peut ruser avec le destin catastrophiste” (2012), but it goes back to Hans Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility: In Search of an Ethics for the Technological Age (1984). It is quite clearly present, as well, in the theology underlying Pope Francis’s encyclical Laudato Sí: On Care for Our Common Home (2015). 14 First Lecture If we can’t hope to cure ourselves for good, we might at least gamble on the lesser of two evils. After all, one form of treatment entails “living well with one’s ailments,” or even simply “living well.” If ecology drives us crazy, it’s because what we call ecology is in effect an alteration of the alteration in our relations with the world. In this respect ecology is both a new form of madness and a new way of struggling against the forms of madness that preceded it. There is no other solution to the problem of treating ourselves without hoping for a cure: we have to get to the bottom of the situation of derelic- tion in which we all find ourselves, whatever nuances our anxieties may take.15 * The expression “relation to the world” itself demonstrates the extent to which we are, so to speak, alienated. The ecological crisis is often presented as the eternally renewed discovery that “man belongs to nature” – a seemingly simple expression that is actually very obscure (and not only because “man” is obviously also “woman”). Is it a way of talking about humans who finally understand that they are part of a “natural world” to which they must learn to conform? In the Western tradition, in fact, most definitions of the human stress the extent to which it is distinguished from nature. This is what is meant, most often, by the notions of “culture,” “society,” or “civilization.” As a result, every time we attempt to “bring humans closer to nature,” we are prevented from doing so by the objection that a human is above all, or is also, a cultural being who has to escape from, or in any case be distinguished from, nature.16 Thus we shall never be able to say too crudely of humans “that they belong to nature.” Moreover, if human beings were truly “natural,” and only that, they would be deemed no longer human at all but only “material objects” or “pure animals” (to use even more ambiguous expressions). 15 As of now, no one has taken this exploration of the relation to time further than Déborah Danowski and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro in The Ends of the World (2016). 16 I am interested here only in the relation established by modern philosophy between subject and object, on the assumption that the opposition between nature in the sense of wildness – “wildlife” – and artifice has been so thoroughly criticized by historians of the environment that there is no need to go back over it. See the classic study edited by William Cronon, Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature (1996), and the recent overview offered by Fabien Locher and Gregory Quenet, “L’histoire environnementale: origines, enjeux et perspectives d’un nouveau chantier” (2009). For a particularly striking example of the artificialization of an ecosystem, see Gregory Quenet, Versailles: une histoire naturelle (2015).  On the instability of the (notion of) nature 15 We understand, then, why every definition of the ecological crisis as a “return of the human to nature” immediately unleashes a sort of panic, since we never know if we are being asked to return to the state of brute beasts or to resume the deep movement of human existence. “But I am not a natural being! I am first of all a cultural being.” “Except that, of course, in fact, you are first of all a natural being, how could you forget that?” Enough to drive us crazy, indeed, and without even mentioning the “return to nature” understood as a “return to the Cave Man era,” whose pathetic lighting system serves as an argument for any ill-tempered modernist who runs into an ecologist of some standing: “If we listened to you, we’d still be lighting with candles!” The difficulty lies in the very expression “relation to the world,” which presupposes two sorts of domains, that of nature and that of culture, domains that are at once distinct and impossible to separate completely. Don’t try to define nature alone, for you’ll have to define the term “culture” as well (the human is what escapes nature: a little, a lot, passionately); don’t try to define “culture” alone, either, for you’ll immediately have to define the term “nature” (the human is what cannot “totally escape” the constraints of nature). Which means that we are not dealing with domains but rather with one and the same concept divided into two parts, which turn out to be bound together, as it were, by a sturdy rubber band. In the Western tradition, we never speak of the one without speaking of the other: there is no other nature but this definition of culture, and no other culture but this definition of nature. They were born together, as inseparable as Siamese twins who hug or hit each other without ceasing to belong to the same body.17 As this argument is essential for what follows, but always difficult to grasp, I need to go back over it several times. You surely remember the period, not so long ago, before the feminist revolution, when the word “man” was used to speak of “everyone,” in an undifferentiated and rather lazy way. In contrast, when the word “woman” was used, it was necessarily a specific term that could designate nothing other than what was then called the “weaker sex,” or the “second sex.” In the vocabulary of anthropologists, this means that the term “man” is an unmarked category: it poses no problem and attracts no attention. When the term “woman” is used, attention is drawn to a specific 17 This is the sense in which we have never been modern: we may believe we have been modern as long as we believe it possible to bring two distinct domains into existence, and we stop having been modern as soon as we realize that there are not two; see Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern ( 1993). 16 First Lecture feature, namely, her sex; this is the feature that makes the category marked and thus detached from the unmarked category that serves as its background. Hence the efforts to replace “man” by “human” and to proceed as if this term common to the two halves of the same humanity signified at once woman and man – each with her or his own sex, or in any case her or his own gender, which distinguishes them both equally, as it were.18 Well, we could make headway on these questions if we could bring about exactly the same gap with the “nature/culture” pairing, so that “nature” would stop sounding like an unmarked category. (The two pairings are historically linked, moreover, but inversely, since “woman” is often found on the side of nature and “man” on the side of culture.)19 Thus I would like to bring into existence a place – a purely conceptual place, for the time being, but one that I shall try to flesh out later on 20 – that makes it possible to define culture and nature as equally marked categories. If you recall the wonderfully ingenious devices adopted to avoid the sexist use of language, you understand that it would be very convenient to have an equivalent for this bond between nature and culture. Alas, since there is no accepted term that plays the same role as “human,” in order to obtain the same effect of correcting the reader’s attention I propose to link the two typographically by referring to Nature/Culture. If the use of “he/she” allows us to avoid taking the male sex as a universal (unmarked) category, similarly we can avoid making nature some- thing universally self-evident against which the marked category of culture would stand out.21 Let us take another comparison, this one borrowed from art history and linked more directly to our perception of nature. We are familiar with the very odd habit in Western painting, starting in the fifteenth century, of organizing the viewer’s gaze so that it can serve as a 18 See Vinciane Despret and Isabelle Despret, Les faiseuses d’histoires: que font les femmes à la pensée? (2011). 19 This reversal has been subject to a great deal of study since Carolyn Merchant’s classic work The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution (1980); Donna Haraway’s Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (1991); and, more recently, Silvia Federici’s Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (2004). The same inverted pairing can be seen in the trouble women scientists have making their voices heard; see the classic example studied by Evelyn Fox Keller, A Feeling for the Organism: The Life and Work of Barbara McClintock (1983). 20 This is the focus of the last four lectures. 21 A crucial work by Philippe Descola has made this position much easier to under- stand: see Beyond Nature and Culture ( 2013).  On the instability of the (notion of) nature 17 counterpart to a spectacle of objects or landscapes. Viewers must not only remain at a certain distance from what they are looking at, but what they see must be arranged, prepared, aligned so as to be rendered perfectly visible. Between the two, there is the plane of the painting, which occupies the midpoint between the object and the subject. Historians have given a lot of thought to the oddness of this scopic regime and the position it assigns to the viewing subject.22 But we do not pay enough attention to the symmetrical strangeness that gives the object the very odd role of being there only so as to be seen by a subject. Someone who is looking, for example, at a still life (the expression itself is significant) is entirely programmed so as to become the subject in relation to this type of object, whereas the objects – for example, oysters, lemons, capons, bowls, bunches of gold-tinged grapes arrayed on the folds of a white tablecloth – have no role other than to be presented to the sight of this particular type of gaze. We can see clearly in this case how absurd it would be to take the subject who is looking as a historical oddity while considering what he/she is looking at – still life!– as something natural or, as it were, self-evident. The two cannot be separated or critiqued separately. What has been invented by Western painting is a pair whose two members are equally bizarre, not to say exotic, a pairing that has not been observed in any other civilization: the object for this subject, the subject for this object. Here, then, is proof that there is an operator, an operation, that distributes object and subject, exactly as there is a common concept that distributes the respective roles of Nature/ Culture by occupying the same place “human” occupies with respect to the marked categories man/woman. To make the presence of this operator less abstract, I asked an artist to draw it.23 He chose to put an architect – Le Corbusier, as it happened! – in the obviously virtual position of someone who slipped into the plane of the painting and staged, symmetrically, the two positions, the one as unnatural as the other, of object and subject. The role of the viewer who is presumed to be contemplating a paint- ing in the Western style is so improbable that the artist represented 22 In the wake of Panofsky’s classic studies, this quite particular type of attention has been the object of significant historical work; see, for example, Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (1999), and, more recently, Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (2007). (The expres- sion “scopic regime” comes from Christian Metz; see Psychoanalysis and Cinema: The Imaginary Signifier, 1982.) 23 Samuel Garcia Perez agreed to do the drawings. For the complete gallery, see http:// modesofexistence.org. 18 First Lecture Figure 1.1 Drawing by Samuel Garcia Perez to flesh out the staging operation through which subject and object are visually constructed. him/her in the form of a tripod to which an enormous single eye is attached!24 But what is not noticed often enough is that the object that serves as counterpart to this eye is just as implausible. To prepare a still life, the artist first has to kill it, as it were, or at least interrupt its movement – hence the lines that trace the trajectory of an object of which the manipulator seizes only a moment, through what is quite appropriately called a “freeze frame.”25 One might say, with very little exaggeration, that there were no more objects in the world before this procedure than there were persons before the invention of photography smiling foolishly in front of a camera while someone yelled “Cheese!”. This schema makes it easier, I hope, to understand why it would be pointless to seek to “reconcile” or “go beyond” the subject and the object without taking into account the operator – represented here by the architect-manipulator – who has distributed the roles to these strange characters, some of whom are going to play the role of nature – for a subject – and others the role of consciousness – of 24 The oddness of the cognitive apparatus imposed on such subjects has been well known since the publication of Erwin Panofsky’s Perspective as Symbolic Form ( 1991). 25 See Julie Berger Hochstrasser, Still Life and Trade in the Dutch Golden Age (2007).  On the instability of the (notion of) nature 19 this object. The example is all the more clarifying in that it is in very large part from painting – landscape painting in particular – that we draw the basis for our conceptions of nature. 26 The manipulator actually exists: he/she is a painter. When Westerners are said to be “naturalists,” it means that they are fond of painted landscapes, and that Descartes imagined the world as if projected onto the canvas of a still life whose manipulator would be God.27 Emphasizing this work of distribution makes it clearer that the expression “belonging to nature” is almost meaningless, since nature is only one element in a complex consisting of at least three terms, the second serving as its counterpart, culture, and the third being the one that distributes features between the first two. In this sense, nature does not exist (as a domain); it exists only as one half of a pair pertaining to one single concept. We must thus take the Nature/ Culture opposition as the topic on which to focus our attention and not at all, any longer, as the resource that would allow us to get out of our difficulties.28 To keep this point in mind, I shall adopt the habit of carefully surrounding “nature” with protective quotation marks, as a reminder that we are dealing with a coding system common to both categories. (To speak of the beings, entities, multiplicities, agents that people used to try to stuff into so-called “nature,” we shall need an additional term, one that I shall introduce toward the end of this lecture.) If ecology sets off panic reactions, we now understand why: because it obliges us to experience the full force of the instability of this concept, when it is interpreted as the impossible opposition between two domains that are presumed actually to exist in the real world. Above all, don’t try to turn “toward nature.” You might just as well try to cross through the plane of the painting to eat the oysters that gleam in the still life. Whatever you do, you will be tripped up, because you will never know whether you’re designating the domains or the concept. And it will be worse if you think you can “reconcile” 26 Interestingly, the object of Philippe Descola’s recent seminars and ongoing work is precisely to link the question of the invention of nature to the history of painting; this approach can be glimpsed in the catalog of his exhibition at the Musée du Quai Branly, La fabrique des images (2010). 27 On the whole question of “empirical style” and the invention of the theme of copy and model, so contrary to scientific practice, see Bruno Latour, What Is the Style of Matters of Concern? Two Lectures on Empirical Philosophy (2008c). 28 Transforming what is an explanatory resource into an object to be explained (shifting from resource to topic) amounts to depriving yourself intentionally of an element of metalanguage and making the element instead a basis for study. Instead of having it at your back, you finally have it in front of you. 20 First Lecture nature and culture or “go beyond” the opposition through “pacified” relations between the two.29 Despite the title of a justifiably famous work, we cannot go “beyond nature and culture.”30 But perhaps it is not entirely impossible to probe on the near side. If we are indeed dealing with one and the same concept consisting of two parts, this demonstrates that the parts are held together by a common core that distributes differences between them. If only we could approach this core, this differential, this apparatus, this manipulator, we could imagine how to get around it. Starting with a language that uses the opposition, we would become capable of translating what we want to say into another language that does not use it. This would give us something with which to begin to treat our madness – by inoculating ourselves with a different one, obviously; I have no illusions about this. * Now, we begin to spot this common core as soon as we take an inter- est in expressions such as “acting in keeping with one’s nature,” or in the classic line about living “according to one’s true nature.” It isn’t hard, here, to detect the normative dimension of such expressions, since they purport to orient all existence according to a model of life that obliges us to choose between false and true ways of being in the world. In this case, the normative power that one would expect to find rather on the “culture” side turns out to be clearly imputed, on the contrary, to the “nature” side of the twofold concept. This curious imputation is more obvious when we mobilize the theme of “human nature,” which one is supposed to “learn to respect” or against which, on the contrary, one is supposed to “learn to struggle.” When we invoke “natural law,” we are expressing even more directly the idea that “nature” can be conceived as a set of quasi- legal regulations. In this case, oddly enough, the adjective “natural” becomes a synonym for “moral,” “legal,” and “respectable.” But of course there is never any way to stabilize its meaning or respect the 29 This is the difficulty that many contemporary philosophers run into when they approach the question of nature: they want to go beyond the division even as they continue to maintain it as the only available explanatory resource. This has been the problem from Catherine Larrère, Les philosophies de l’environnement (1997), through Dominique Bourg, Vers une démocratie écologique: le citoyen, le savant et le politique (2010), to Pierre Charbonnier, La fin d’un grand partage: de Durkheim à Descola (2015); the last keeps “the great distribution” in place even though he declares that the end has come. 30 I am of course referring here to Descola’s Beyond Nature and Culture (2013).  On the instability of the (notion of) nature 21 injunction. As soon as any authority sets out on a campaign to keep acts said to be “against nature” from being committed, protests arise at once: in the name of what do you dare decide which behavioral norms are “natural” and which are “against nature”? Since morality has been the object of vehement disputes for a very long time in our societies, any effort to stabilize an ethical judgment by the invocation of nature will appear as the scarcely concealed disguise of an ideol- ogy. The indignation aroused by such invocations is proof enough that “nature,” here with its quotation marks, cannot invoke nature, without quotes, in order to end a moral controversy. In other words, on these subjects, as on that of “organic” products or “100% natural” yogurt, we are all fairly likely to be constructiv- ists – not to say relativists. As soon as we are told that a product is “natural,” we understand clearly, at worst, that someone is trying to trick us and, at best, that someone has discovered another way of being “artificial.” What was possible for Aristotle is no longer pos- sible today: nature cannot unify the polity. It suffices to say that a position has been “naturalized” for us to conclude that the position has to be contested, historicized, or at least contextualized. We are at the point where the moral connotation of the notion of “nature” has been so clearly overturned that the first reflex of every critical tradition consists in fighting naturalization. In fact, as soon as anyone “naturalizes” or “essentializes” a state of affairs, the proposition becomes almost inevitably the assertion of a legal imperative. So much so that, in practice, it is as though common sense had fused the statements de facto and de jure. Everyone understands that, if ecology consisted in going back to that sort of appeal to nature and its laws, we would not manage to understand one another any time soon. In today’s pluralistic society, a stable meaning for the adjective “natural” is no easier to establish than meanings for “moral,” “legal,” or “respectable.” Here, then, we have a set of cases in which the Nature/Culture theme appears in broad daylight as a distribution of roles, functions, and arguments that cannot be reduced to just one of its two components, despite the claims of those who use it. The more you talk about “staying within the limits of what is natural,” the less you will get general agreement.31 31 I have heard about militants who are fighting to prevent judges in Lebanon from continuing to use the expression “unnatural acts” to condemn homosexuality, but who are also seeking to introduce the idea of crimes against nature to protect rivers against industrial pollution! Such an example highlights the extent to which the appeal to nature can be unstable. 22 First Lecture The situation is entirely different with the other family of notions associated with “nature” in the expression “natural world.” In this case, it does seem possible actually to distinguish the two parts of the same theme and reach agreement. Or, at least, we thought so before the ecological crises and, more precisely, before the New Climate Regime made the invocation of “nature” as polemical as that of natural law. And yet, at first glance, the situation ought to be quite different, because the “natural world,” as everyone seems to agree, cannot dictate to humans what they must do. Between what is and what must be,32 there must exist a gulf that cannot be crossed? This is in effect the default position of the ordinary epistemology that is adopted as soon as someone claims to be “turning to nature as it is.” No more ideologies: states of affairs speak “for themselves,” and one has to take endless precautions not to draw any moral conclusions from them. No prescription may emerge from their description. No passion may be added to the dispassionate presentation of the simple connections of cause to effect. The highly celebrated cloak of “axio­ logical neutrality” is de rigueur in such presentations. Contrary to the previous case, here what is “natural” thus defines not what is just, but only what “is just there, nothing more.” It suffices to reflect for only a moment, obviously, to notice that the difference between the two meanings of the word “just” is very slight, and that the default position is very unstable. Every time someone starts to invoke the “natural world,” in any sort of argu- ment, the normative dimension will remain present, but in a more convoluted form, since the principal injunction will insist precisely that the “natural world” will not have a moral lesson to impart, or even that it will not allow anyone to draw any moral lesson whatso- ever. Here is a very powerful moral requirement: the one according to which one must abstain completely from moral judgment if one wants to take the full measure of the reality of what is!33 One might as well deny Mr Spock and the inhabitants of Vulcan any sense of good and evil. As for the “nothing more,” it seems as though that point is not going to be maintained for long! On the contrary, what 32 Trans.: The French verb devoir, like the English verb “must,” can convey either supposition based on evidence (“She must have left... ”) or imperative obligation (“She must leave!”). 33 Tracing the history of these moral attitudes is the object of Lorraine Daston’s sys- tematic work, starting with “The Factual Sensibility: An Essay Review on Artifact and Experiment” (1988), all the way to her book with Fernando Vidal, The Moral Authority of Nature (2004).  On the instability of the (notion of) nature 23 a long sequel of arguments will be rolled out in the process of setting forth the uncontestable necessity of what is against the muddled uncertainties of what must be! All the more so in that the simple description is accompanied by an extremely constraining set of injunctions: one “must” learn to respect brute facts; one “must not” draw hasty conclusions either about the way they are ordered or about the lessons that ought to be drawn from them; above all, they “must” be known first of all “in complete objectivity”; and, when they impose themselves, it “must be” in an uncontested and non-controversial way. Here we have a lot of “musts” imposed by something that is supposed to be “just there, nothing more.” Such is in fact the paradox of the invocation of “nature”: a formidable prescriptive charge conveyed by what is not supposed to possess any prescriptive dimension.34 The instability of this second-degree normative dimension is usually summarized in the following expression: “[One must respect] the laws of nature [which] impose themselves on everyone [whatever one may do and whatever one may think].” If the expression were really sufficient, the components in square brackets would not be needed; we would simply have a statement of what is imposed. And yet the normative injunction is indeed implied, since, in practice, those at risk of not obeying these laws are always the ones who have to be reminded. This interlocutory situation, most often disputational, sometimes polemical, is found every time someone uses the non-moral existence of the “natural world” to criticize some cultural choice or some human behavior. The pure, brute existence of incontestable facts enters abruptly into the discussion to bring it to an end, thus fully playing the normative role that these facts were not supposed to have – the role of unchallenged arbiter coming precisely from their “purely natural” existence. Since this simple existence is in such contrast to the desires, needs, ideals, and fantasies of humans, every time someone insists on the facts their insistence brings to light an eminent value that is held to be more cherished than all the others: “Respect that which quite simply is, whether you want to or not!” The allusion to the arbitrary human will, which one “has to” know how to oppose, brings back at full strength the normative charge that had initially been removed. It is because the always divisive questions of morality have been set aside that agreement will finally be reached: “And you must do this 34 It is to Friedrich Nietzsche, especially in The Gay Science, that we owe the analysis of the moral wellsprings of the scientific attitude of objectivity: see The Gay Science, with a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs ( 1974). 24 First Lecture whether you like it or not!” Here I am simply offering a philosophical comment on the virile gesture of someone who pounds his/her fist on the table to bring a discussion to an end.35 The invocation of nature is never satisfied with defining a moral law; it always serves, as well, to recall to order those who are straying from it. In the notion of “nature,” there is thus always, inevitably, a polemical dimension. The requirement of sticking to the facts is nor- mative to the second degree. Not content to introduce the supreme moral value, this requirement purports, in addition, to be achieving the political ideal par excellence: the agreement of minds despite disagreements on moral questions.36 Clearly, it is hard not to see here once again the contrast between the two parts of the Nature/ Culture concept. The two sides of the concept that we are trying to get around are thus indeed present at the same time, exactly as they are in the interminable, constantly renewed quarrels over the force of “natural law.” Appearances notwithstanding, the invocation of the “natural world” offers an even stronger prescriptive charge than in the previous case. In all cases, what people are seeking to detect are indeed acts “against nature,” but, as soon as someone claims to have found one, the accusation of “naturalizing” a simple set of facts into a legal imperative obliges critics to spring into action. As we can sense quite readily, what is de facto, in practice, is also, here again, de jure. * Oddly, those who first remarked upon this paradox in public were not the ecologists but their most relentless adversaries. In fact, without the immense undermining work undertaken by the climate skeptics against the sciences of the Earth System, we would never have grasped the extent to which the invocation of the “natural world” had ceased to be stable. Thanks to this false quarrel, an argument that had remained the discovery of a small number of historians of science is now becoming visible in broad daylight.37 35 The classic article by Malcolm Ashmore, Derek Edwards, and Jonathan Potter remains unequalled: see “The Bottom Line: The Rhetoric of Reality Demonstrations” (1994). 36 The social history of the sciences, from its beginnings (see, for example, Barry Barnes and Steven Shapin, eds, Natural Order: Historical Studies of Scientific Culture, 1979), has explored all possible ways of understanding the political effect of epistemology in the course of controversies. 37 One can say that all the questions in the realm of “science studies” (see Dominique Pestre, Introduction aux science studies, 2006) have become public, in this context, and that the questions raised, for example, by Steven Shapin in The Scientific Life: A Moral History of a Late Modern Vocation (2008) are now shared by the researchers  On the instability of the (notion of) nature 25 From the 1990s on, as we know, powerful pressure groups have been mobilized to cast doubt on the “facts” (a mix of more and more complex and at the same time more and more robust models and measures) that were beginning to establish a consensus within research communities about the human origin of climate mutations.38 Despite the distinction between facts and values that is so dear to philosophers and ethicists alike, the heads of the major companies under threat identified the stakes right away. They saw that, if the facts were known (CO2 emissions are the principal source of climate change), politicians, pressed by the anxiety of the public, would immediately demand that measures be taken. We owe to the astute Republican strategist Frank Luntz, a psychosociologist and unri- valled rhetorician, the celebrated inventor of the expression “climate change” in the place of “global warming,”39 the best formulation of this profound philosophy: the description of the facts is so danger- ously close to the prescription of a policy that, to put a stop to the challenges addressed to the industrial way of life, one has to cast doubt on the facts themselves: Most scientists believe that warming is caused largely by manmade pollutants that require strict regulation. Mr. Luntz seems to acknowledge as much when he says that “the scientific debate is closing against us.” His advice, however, is to emphasize that the evidence is not complete. “Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled,” he writes, “their views about global warming will change accordingly. Therefore, you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue.”40 The prescriptive charge of scientific certainties is so powerful that these are what must be attacked first.41 Hence the development of under attack by the “skeptics.” See especially Mike Hulme, Why We Disagree about Climate Change: Understanding Controversy, Inaction and Opportunity (2009), and the book edited by Clive Hamilton, Christophe Bonneuil, and François Gemenne, The Anthropocene and the Global Environmental Crisis: Rethinking Modernity in a New Epoch (2015). 38 There is now an abundant literature on the topic, starting with Naomi Oreskes’s 2004 article “Beyond the Ivory Tower: The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change,” then her 2010 book with Erik M. Conway, Merchants of Doubt. See also James Hoggan, Climate Cover-Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming (2009). 39 Frank Luntz, Words That Work (2005), is cited at length in reporting about “com- municators”; see the film by Barak Goodman and Rachel Dretzen, The Persuaders (2004). 40 “Environmental Word Games” (2003), emphasis added. 41 The use of the epistemological position to destroy the authority of the sciences through the attribution of a sort of auto-immune disease to the scientific institution has struck me ever since the emergence of Mr Luntz; see Bruno Latour, “Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern” (2004a). 26 First Lecture this pseudo-controversy that has so wonderfully succeeded in con- vincing a large part of the public that climate science remains com- pletely uncertain, and that climatologists are just one lobby among others, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is just an attempt on the part of mad scientists to dominate the planet, the chemistry of the upper atmosphere is just a plot “against the American way of life,” and ecology is just an attack on humanity’s inviolable right to modernize itself.42 All this without managing to shake the consensus of the experts, a consensus whose validity has become more solid every year.43 If there were general agreement that CO2 , and thus coal as well as gasoline, was the cause of climate change, the industrialists and the financiers have understood perfectly that the description of the facts could never again be kept apart from their moral implications – and from the subsequent development of a policy. The imputation of responsibility demands a response – especially of course when the cause is “human.”44 If the industrialists and the financiers don’t fight energetically, the factual reality will become the equivalent of a legal imperative. To describe is always not only to inform but also to alarm, to move, to set into motion, to call to action, perhaps even to sound the death knell. This has been known, of course; but it still needed to be shown in broad daylight. Facing the enormity of the first climate threat (the one that emerged from research work), pressure groups were mobilized to respond to an even greater threat, as they saw it – one that stemmed directly from the first: the public was going to hold them responsible, and consequently would impose a profound transformation of the regula- tory environment. It hardly needs saying that, in the face of such an emergency, ordinary philosophy of science doesn’t carry much weight. You won’t intimidate the powerful by pounding on the table; it does 42 The reverberations of this strategy in France have been apparent in the lasting effectiveness with which Claude Allègre, mixing media, politics, and science, has managed right up to the present day to spread the belief that there are “two schools of thought” on this key question. See Edwin Zaccai, François Gemenne, and Jean-Michel Decroly, eds, Controverses climatiques, sciences et politiques (2012). 43 The experts publish overviews “above the fray” (see Catherine Jeandel and Remy Mosseri, Le climat à découvert: outils et méthodes en recherche climatique, 2011; Virginie Masson-Delmotte, Climat: le vrai et le faux, 2011), but in vain: they are heard only as taking sides, something that is new for them. Even the reports of the IPCC have not succeeded in closing the debate as far as the public is concerned. 44 We shall come back to the impossibility of distinguishing between facts and values in the next lecture, and also in the fourth, where I shall introduce the notion of the Anthropocene.  On the instability of the (notion of) nature 27 no good to say to them: “The facts are there, dear CEOs, whether you like them or not!” The celebrated “axiological neutrality” will be shattered to bits. The lobbyists have set into motion a whole panoply of communicators, paid experts, and even academics above suspicion, to generate a demand on the part of the public for something entirely different, on the strength of quite different facts. As one of them has written, carbon is “innocent” and must be thoroughly scrubbed free of all accusations and all responsibility.45 No doubt about it: other non-facts will result in other non-policies! We can grasp the full perversity of the appeals to the “state of the natural world” when we note that the counter-attack has been able to work only because the default position, that of ordinary philosophy of science, continued to look like common sense to everyone: to the public, to politicians, and especially – most astonishingly – to climate experts, those who found themselves so violently and so unfairly attacked because, according to their adversaries, they had crossed the yellow line between facts and values. In fact, if the lobbyists had said, “We do not believe in these facts; they do not suit us; they lead to sacrifices that we do not want to make,” or, as President George H. W. Bush said, “Our way of life is not negotiable,”46 everyone would have seen through them. No one can get away with saying, of the “natural world,” that one “doesn’t want” it, doesn’t want to deal with it. Facts, as they say, are presumed to be “stubborn”; that is their way of prescribing. One can’t negotiate with them or adjust them to suit oneself. The climate skeptics have thus been clever enough to turn ordi- nary philosophy of science against their adversaries. They have stuck with the facts alone, by calmly asserting that “the facts aren’t there, whether you like it or not.” And they have started pounding forcefully on the table. The trap is well set: whereas the powerful have it both ways, discerning the prescriptive charge of the facts perfectly well and at the same time strictly limiting the debate to the discussion of only those discoveries whose existence they deny, the others sense that the facts lead to action but don’t allow themselves to follow those facts 45 François Gervais, L’innocence du carbone: l’effet de serre remise en question (2013). Conversely, P. K. Haff and Erle C. Ellis have proposed that geologists take a solemn vow when they finish their studies, a new form of the Hippocratic oath, given the importance to society of their future responsibilities: see Ruggero Matteucci et al., “A Hippocratic Oath for Geologists?” (2012), which confirms the passage from geochemistry to geophysiology and the transformation of the earth sciences into sciences of intensive care. 46 In 1992, at the Earth Summit in Rio: “The American way of life is not negotiable.” In the sixth lecture we shall trace the theological origin of such an assertion. 28 First Lecture across the barrier that their adversaries nevertheless cross nimbly in both directions! Result: the pseudo-skeptics have made mincemeat of their unfortunate opponents. Mr Spock’s mechanical voice is not supposed to quaver before the measurements, the alarms, the warn- ings, and the imputations of responsibility. Yet the climatologists’ voice never stopped quavering before discoveries that were all the more awkward in that the experts didn’t know how to handle their moral and political charge, even though the implications were quite obvious.47 What is to be done, indeed, in the face of “inconvenient truths” if you possess only the right of uttering them with a mechani- cal voice and without adding any recommendation to them?48 You will remain paralyzed. This is why for some twenty years now we have been watching the astonishing spectacle of a pitched battle between one party that has perfectly grasped the normative function that invocations of the natural world perform – and for this reason denies the existence of that world – and another party that does not dare unleash the pre- scriptive force of the facts it has discovered and must limit itself, as if it had its hands tied behind its back, to speaking only of “science.”49 In a superb reversal of the situation, the earth science experts are the ones today who look like over-excited militants of a cause; fanatics, catastrophists, and climate skeptics are the ones assuming the role of stern scientists who at least do not confuse the way the world is going with the way it ought to go! They have even succeeded in appropriat- ing – while reversing its meaning – the fine word “skeptic.”50 * In Pierre Daubigny’s play Gaia Global Circus, which serves as a red thread running through these lectures, Virginia, a climatologist who 47 Oddly enough, the experts’ anguish has been made most perceptible in a graphic novel: see Philippe Squarzoni’s admirable Climate Changed: A Personal Journey through the Science (2014), the best introduction to the New Climate Regime grasped from the standpoint of its aesthetic – in the etymological sense of learning to become sensitive. 48 See Al Gore, An Inconvenient Truth: The Planetary Emergency of Global Warming and What We Can Do About It (2006). 49 Fortunately, more and more scientists are realizing that they must not agree to argue about science with the climate skeptics. See, for example, the blog post by climatologist Mark Maslin, “Why I’ll Talk Politics with Climate Change Deniers – but Not Science” (2014). As Aykut and Dahan make clear, the question is no longer – and hasn’t been for a long time – a question of knowledge (Gouverner le climat?). 50 This tradition has nothing to do with the polarization of confirmed facts, as we see in Frédéric Brahami, Le travail du scepticisme: Montaigne, Bayle, Hume (2001).  On the instability of the (notion of) nature 29 sums up the confirmed facts before an audience of bloggers despite the constant interruptions of a paid climate skeptic called Ted, is given a line that would make it possible to get out of the trap in which scientists have let themselves be caught. She proposes to use a means that would amount to modifying the relation between the sciences and politics, and in particular the relation between scientists and the world with which they are trying to enter into resonance. Scientists would have to accept their responsibilities, in Donna Haraway’s sense: they would have to become capable of responding, would have to acknowledge that they have “response-ability.”51 On stage, pushed to the limit by Ted, who never stops demanding a “democratic” debate, “fair and balanced” in the sense of Fox News, where skeptics would carry the same weight as the “warming sect,”52 Virginia, like an evolutionist obliged to answer the objections of a creationist, hesitates to take up the challenge. She knows that the trap consists in acting as though there were a dearth of debates, as though the question had not been discussed fully enough. And yet the discus- sion has taken place: successive reports of the IPCC have summarized nearly twenty years of documentation, and the estimated degree of certainty is close to 98 percent – at least concerning the human origin of global warming.53 On the massive phenomenon against which Ted is trying to turn the audience, the question was settled long before it entered this amphitheater. Virginia would now like to move on to the large number of questions that remain controversial, the most interesting ones in her eyes. Yet, if Ted is going to win, it will not be because he knows the subject better than she does or because he introduces new facts. He is paid to apply the philosophy of Mr Luntz: all he has to do to win is persuade the audience in the room that there is a debate among experts. To agree to respond is to reproduce a televised discussion in which Ms Pro is confronting Mr Con for the maximum pleasure of the audience, which will come away reassured by a demobilizing “what does anyone know?”54 The very organ of 51 Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (2016), p. 16. 52 This is the term, quite well chosen, it must be said, that Ted uses to designate those who “believe” (as if it were a matter of belief!) in warming that is human in origin. 53 It goes without saying that there remain countless controversies over the conse- quences to draw from this causality, and about its precise mechanisms, the reliability of the models, the quality of the data, and of course the measures to be taken. The consensus bears only on the vast scope of the phenomenon and its urgency. 54 The effectiveness of the procedure is ensured, as can be seen in an opinion piece (“À quoi peut encore servir la COP 21?”) by the economist and social theorist Jacques Attali in L’Express on March 16, 2015: “First of all, there is no consensus on the 30 First Lecture reason, open debate, becomes in this case the organ of manipula- tion.55 And yet, if Virginia refuses to engage in the exercise that is being imposed, she knows quite well that she’ll appear dogmatic – a mortal sin in the era of unlimited commentary on the Web... But what to do? In the current context, there is no alternative. A scientist has to appear cool, distant, indifferent, and disinterested. For several seconds, in suspense, Virginia explores other solutions, each one more calamitous than the one before. This is when, in a moment of inspiration and panic, she cries out against Ted, whom the spectators are on the verge of driving out of the room: “Go tell your masters that the scientists are on the warpath!” However, in the next scene she admits sheepishly that she doesn’t know what that means. For scientists, in fact, the warpath doesn’t exist. The others, the ones who sent Ted to disrupt Virginia’s talk, are the ones at war, as they have been for a long time. Neither the honest researchers, like Virginia – before her outburst – nor her well- meaning audience know that they are at war. They think they are still safely behind the Maginot line of rational debate carried out between reasonable people in an enclosed and protected space reserved for questions of lesser importance or with remote applications. As soon as they hear talk about “respecting the facts,” they feel obliged to respond politely, since respect for the facts is the basic principle of their method, too. If Virginia hadn’t responded so energetically, the trap of negationism would have snapped shut on her.56 Except that this negationism does not apply to past facts, facts long since confirmed that are now criticized only by people whose ideol- ogy is too clearly apparent – they cannot live in a world in which humans could be capable of committing such crimes. This time what is at stake involves present facts, facts that are reaching us, acts that are being committed, right now. And here the ideology is not so easy to detect, for they are legion, those who would like not to live in a mechanisms involved: for some, the sun is responsible, and there is nothing we can do about it. For others, human activities are responsible, and in particular the emission of greenhouse gases; and there is a lot we can do about it. For still others, finally, on a worldwide basis the temperature has not been increasing for more than ten years; the worst is over and there is no point worrying about it.” Isn’t that “first of all” admirable?! 55 James Hoggan, I’m Right and You’re an Idiot: The Toxic State of Public Discourse and How to Clean it Up (2016). 56 The trap works if one responds empirically but also, on the contrary, if one refuses to respond empirically, as it does in cases where past crimes are being denied. See Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Assassins of Memory: Essays on the Denial of the Holocaust ( 1992).  On the instability of the (notion of) nature 31 world where humans are capable of such crimes! We are touched in our most intimate being by the hope that humanity will never have such capability. We are constantly at risk of conspiring with our enemies. This is what it really means to find ourselves at war: to have to decide, without any pre-established rules, which side we’re going to have to be on.57 All the more so in that the negationists, this time, are not marginal types who play at “breaking down the taboos” of the elites; these are the elites themselves, at war against other elites.58 The phenomena being debated bear upon the near future; they oblige us to rethink the entire past, but above all they entail a frontal attack on the decisions of many pressure groups, and they bear upon questions of direct inter- est to billions of humans obliged to change their mode of life down to the smallest details of their existence. How can we hope that the scientists will be heard without a fight? And to complicate the situation further, the scientific disciplines that have come together to develop these facts that have become so sturdy do not come from the prestigious sciences such as particle physics or mathematics; they come from a multitude of earth sciences whose certainties have been achieved not by some earth-shaking, fool-proof demonstration but by the weaving together of thousands of tiny facts, reworked through modeling into a tissue of proofs that draw their robustness from the multiplicity of data, each piece of which remains obviously fragile.59 Between a tissue of proofs and a tissue of lies, we understand that people who know nothing about the practice of science are quick to confuse the two – especially if it’s really in their interest that the data prove false. Poor Virginia. What a dereliction, and what a cry! How could she not be ashamed to feel in her own trembling hand the weight of the tomahawk that 57 I shall come back to this essential principle in the seventh lecture. 58 The Academy of the Sciences (at least in France) is mobilized in this context, along with major media such as the Wall Street Journal, with the signatures of Nobel laureates (see Claude Allègre et al., “No Need to Panic about Global Warming,” 2012). Their views are not so easy to sweep away on the same basis as the pompous predictions of those who campaign against vaccinations or who believe in the Hollow Earth. 59 As Spencer Weart (The Discovery of Global Warming, 2003) and Paul N. Edwards (A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming, 2010) have shown, the climate sciences are very different from those that gave rise to the hope, in the twentieth century, that they were establishing the foun- dation for all the others. Along with the importance taken on by models, the most acceptable explanation for the skepticism on the part of certain scientists is the very variety of these disciplines, which are often close to natural history: many scientists in the twentieth century were expecting an entirely different scientific revolution. 32 First Lecture she has just dug up? Ted is driven out, but a new nightmare is now beginning for Virginia. For her exclamation to be understood, the community of clima- tologists to which she belongs has to acknowledge that they actually do have a politics. That they can answer back by asking: “Whom do you represent, and for whom are you fighting?” The question in fact makes sense. When climate skeptics denigrate the science of cli- matologists, whom they accuse of behaving as a lobby, they too are assembled as a group, for which they have defined admissions tests and drawn boundaries, distributing the components of the world in a different way – what one can expect of politics and how science is supposed to function (this is what we shall call, later on, their “cosmogram”).60 Why wouldn’t the climatologists do the same thing? There is no reason for them to keep claiming that they are not in the game, as if they were speaking from nowhere and behaving as if they didn’t belong to any earthbound population. One would be tempted to offer them some advice: “But finally, instead of believing that you have to make your science meet the impossibly inflated demands of an epistemology that requires you to be disembodied and located nowhere, just say where you are situated.”61 We would like Virginia to be able to say, finally: “Why aren’t you proud of having invented this extraordinary equipment that allows you to give voice to mute things as if they were in a position to speak?62 If your adversaries tell you that you are engaged in politics by taking yourselves as representatives of numerous neglected voices, for heaven’s sake answer ‘Yes, of course!’ If politics consists in represent- ing the voices of the oppressed and the unknown, then we would all be in a much better situation if, instead of pretending that the others are the ones engaged in politics and that you are engaged ‘only in science,’ you recognized that you were also in fact trying to assemble another political body and to live in a coherent cosmos composed in a different way. If it is entirely correct that you are not speaking in the name of an institution limited by the borders of nation-states and that the basis for your authority rests on a very strange system of election and proofs, this is precisely what makes your political power to represent so many new agents so important. That power of 60 The term is borrowed from John Tresch, “Cosmogram” (2005). 61 Here we see the full importance of the notion of “situated knowledge” devel- oped by Donna Haraway in “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century” (1991). 62 The analysis of this system of scientific and political representation is the focus of my two related works Pandora’s Hope: Essay on the Reality of Science Studies (1999) and Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy ( 2004b), which serve as the background for this argument.  On the instability of the (notion of) nature 33 representation will be of capital importance in the coming conflicts over the form of the world and the new geopolitics. Don’t sell it for a mess of pottage.” Such a confession would not cast the slightest shadow of doubt on the quality, the objectivity, or the solidity of the scientific dis- ciplines, since it is now clear that the network of instruments, the Vast Machine that the climatologists have built, ends up producing knowledge that is robust enough to withstand the objections. In any case, on this Earth, the adjective objective has no other meaning. There is no other source that can surpass the type of certainties that you have been capable of accumulating. What could it mean to know the human origin of climate change better than the climatologists do? This thesis was harder to advocate, I acknowledge, in an earlier period, when the apparatus, the groups, the cost, the institutions, and the controversies over the facts were not as visible.63 But this is no longer the case. Just as no GPS point can be determined without the vast array of satellite equipment that makes zeroing in on it possible, every somewhat solid fact has to be accompanied by a whole suite of instruments, by its assembly of experts engaged in debate, and by its public. One cannot act as though one knew more and more without being caught up oneself in the machinery of knowledge production. To plead against the results of science, there is no Supreme Court, certainly not the Supreme Court of Nature. It is the scientific institu- tion that we have to learn to protect. * At the risk of shocking my climatologist friends, I am for my part beginning to think that, philosophically, the billions spent by the climate-skeptic lobbies to create the false controversy over the climate will not have been spent in vain, since we can now see quite clearly to what extent claims about the “natural world” are no more apt to promote agreement than claims about “natural law.” Nor, for anyone observing the pseudo-controversies over the climate, does the appeal to the “laws of nature” allow us to