Bruno Latour. RIP

In de introductie van zijn boek Facing Gaia. Eight Lectures On The New Climatic Regime (2017) schreef de onlangs overleden, prominente Franse socioloog en antropoloog, professor Bruno Latour:   

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. 

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’ 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. 

De tweede Koude Oorlog, de hervatting van de onderlinge strijd tussen grootmachten, uitgerust met massavernietigingswapens, demonstreert een levensgevaarlijk autisme van getroebleerde geesten die niet willen beseffen dat de mensheid nu bedreigd wordt door hele andere krachten, die door de mens zijn opgeroepen. Latour wijst in dit verband op ‘the modes of existence that turn out to be under the more and more pervasive shadow of Gaia,’ en introduceert het begrip ‘New Climate Regime.’ Hij schrijft daarover: 

I use this term to summarize the present situation, in which the physical framework that the Moderns had taken for granted, the ground on which their history had always been played out, has become unstable. As if the décor had gotten up on stage to share the drama with the actors. From this moment on, everything changes in the way stories are told, so much so that the political order now includes everything that previously belonged to nature — a figure that, in an ongoing backlash effect, becomes an ever more undecipherable enigma.

For years, my colleagues and I tried to come to grips with this intrusion of nature and the sciences into politics; we developed a number of methods for following and even mapping ecological controversies. But all this specialized work never succeeded in shaking the certainties of those who continued to imagine a social world without objects set off against a natural world without humans — and without scientists seeking to know that world. While we were trying to unravel some of the knots of epistemology and sociology, the whole edifice that had distributed the functions of these fields was falling to the ground — or, rather, was falling, literally back down to Earth. We were still discussing possible links between humans and nonhumans, while in the meantime scientists were inventing a multitude of ways to talk about the same thing, but on a completely different scale: ‘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 not react to our actions. 

Wij leven nu in het Antropoceen, het tijdperk waarin het klimaat en de atmosfeer omvangrijke veranderingen ondergaan als gevolg van menselijke activiteiten. Het is een nieuw ‘geological epoch dating from the commencement of significant human impact on Earth's geology and ecosystems, including, but not limited to, anthropogenic climate change.’ Voor het eerst in de geschiedenis van de 4,5 miljard jaar oude planeet is de impact van een soort zo groot dat de aarde ingrijpende gevolgen ervan ondervindt in de atmosfeer, lithosfeer, biosfeer, cryosfeer en oceanen. Op zijn beurt heeft dit een onoverzienbaar effect op het bestaan van alle soorten, inclusief de mens. Hoewel professor Latour opmerkt dat ‘All of a sudden, everyone senses that another Spirit of the Laws of Nature 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,’ blijven mainstream-opiniemakers als Geert Mak die bedreiging negeren, en trachten met hun simplistisch manicheïsme de aandacht af te leiden naar datgene dat zij als het Grote Kwaad in de wereld betitelen, te weten ‘Rusland,’ dat ‘weer in  beweging is gekomen,’ en dat na ‘de ineenstorting van het Sovjet Rijk opnieuw geschiedenis wil maken, en hoe!’ En dat mag niet van de Makkianen, alleen Washington en Wall Street mogen in hun ogen ‘geschiedenis maken,’ de rest heeft maar te gehoorzamen, net zoals tot ver na de ‘politionele acties’ Catrinus Mak er blind van uitging dat de gekleurde inheemsen in ‘Ons Indië’ het witte Nederland rijk moesten houden, een opvatting waarvoor hij pas tegen het einde van zijn leven zich intens ‘schaamde,’ overigens zonder dat zijn zoon Geert hieruit een les trok, want ook bij hem geldt: ‘ijdelheid der ijdelheden, het is al ijdelheid.’ Daar staat tegenover de dagelijkse realiteit:

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 glaciers 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.’

Opnieuw Bruno Latour die waarschuwt dat:

talking about a ‘crisis’ would be just another way of reassuring 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 crisis! The experts tell us we should be talking instead about a ‘mutation’: we were used to one world; we are now tipping, mutating, into another. As for the adjective ‘ecological,’ we use that word for reassurance as well, all too often, as a way of distancing ourselves from 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 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.