Precis on Latour's Plea for Earthly Sciences

In a text that literally begins with “ladies and gentleman,” it’s impossible for us to ignore the “Plea for Earthly Sciences” that Latour goes on to make. It’s refreshing that the thing he begins with is a she, even if it’s the accusation that we all of us are killing her and we none of us are doing it with reason. “Humans, as a whole,” wage war “without any explicit declaration,” and surely without any possibilities of winning, “against Gaia,” the goddess who has managed to “maintain life on Earth inside some fluctuating albeit restricted limits” (read: the atmosphere/biosphere/“magneto-sphere”—Dale’s word, not mine). For a lecture that’s given to an audience of sociologists, the politics he’s identifying with, at this point, and which he’ll circle back to at the end, sound undeniably green. Much like the British (those bloody semi-colonical British) at the beaches of Dunkirk, he spends the rest of the text retreating from the facts of truly “global disasters” to the crises that unite us in what must be a collective turning to face the facts.

Latour takes up Sloterdijk (ha, right?) when he says that the moment we took a breath of gas and not air is the moment we came to understand “the world” as “the environment.” This was the inaugural moment for modernity then, and it is from within that space that he defines the domain of the social. The world was transformed into the environment, then, in much the same way that the ecological crisis was transformed into a response, now, for the annual meeting which he is presently addressing. The meeting is titled, and I quote him, “quot[ing]: social connections: identities, technologies, and relationships.”

After a meditation on why we shouldn’t be proud to endorse the use of the word Anthropocene to describe “this new geological era,” (and why not? Aren’t we capable of war crimes of such a proportion that we should get to name our own extinction after us?)—Latour taks a jab at “the future.”

But something strange happens to our identities as Earthlings when the definition of the future changes. It’s not that we’re “free at last!” It’s that we’re sent “back to the design table” that I imagine looks a lot like the table in Haraway’s INFORMATICS. To the extent that that’s the occasion for this speech, Latour proposes (for “a second time,” because apparently the first was many years ago when nobody was listening) that “we shift the definition of sociology from the study of the social connections to the study of associations.” The shifting ensures that the social stays true to its etymology in a way that allows it also to explicate all other types of connections—the non-social: the natural, the material, the economic, the biological, the psychological.

Social is defined, in order of ascending importance, as social n1 or as social n2.

Social n1 is unsustainable, and no one is more acutely aware of that than Latour himself. It is defined as a domain that is not “non-social.” Not only does this fail to explain anything—including itself—it has to be explained. It solicits an explanation that can perhaps be best understood as the disappearance of “nature and society.” What Latour means by this is no small thing: it is a sea change (like the sea change that Gore endlessly cites in an Inconvenient Truth) in which matters of fact have become matters of concern and in which objects have become things.

Of what can the world possibly consist when it is made neither of “nature or society or any combination thereof”?

If we look to actor-network-theory (ANT), we have the example that my signature on a contract is a thing that is binding, but that it is binding legally and not socially. If we look to STS, we have the example of a container within which a space for definition of the “global” was opened up. It is the same thing to say that the spread of the container depends on “legal litigation” (among accounting procedures, labor relations among workers unions, and so on) as it is to say that a technology is an assemblage of “complex heterogenous threads.” The examples of law and technology tell us that the durability, solidarity, force and intelligibility of the associations is entirely due to the ways by which laws and techniques connect.

The problem—as made obvious at the level of examples themselves—is that these connections are radically contingent. When Latour says that a theory cannot claim that every mode of connection is specific, we are relieved and ready to hear the next of his theses: that “the social sciences have a true object which is not the social per se, but the shifting attachments offered by various non-social modes of connections.” When we realize this obfuscates more than illuminates his argument, we realize that it all makes sense if we just think of it as “Legos.” (What could possibly be more grounding than a toy pile?) It’s important that legos are used to build things—they’re literally building blocks. Legos—blocks that metaphorically represent things like the law, religion, politics, technology, avant-garde art—come in different colors and shapes and are differently pegged. They are particular, socialized, historicized. When a kind of collective is then built out of this heterogeneity, then all of a sudden things like “bricks coming together through legal ties” start happening. Even though the bricks come from “all over the place,” the thing that happens when they come together is that they are stronger in their solidarity regardless of the mode of connection of religion or politics or science.” And then when it is big enough, we, like children, smile and point at it and say of it “look, this is the social.”

When we look to define things like “science,” the closest thing to a definition we can come to is to nudge up against heuristics like it is literally the sum of its parts. If the way that a lego, a particular social domain, finds its way to solidarity is vis a vis the connections it makes in its continuity with other legos, the non-social domains, then we must look at the connections which are necessarily inexhaustible (“legally, scientifically, religiously, artistically, politically, technically,” and so on).

At a place in the text where our attention should “shift to the modes of connections,” it is appropriate that Latour would end by connecting his project back up to the place from which he began. When he acknowledges that the problem of the social sciences is that “they are not empirical enough,” the thing he does is jettison empiricism itself. Just at the time in history when it is most crucial that we redesign the whole sphere of existence “from top to bottom,” the thing he does instead is say—with trepidation, nonetheless—that we have to give up on what we hitherto have always depended on. We must give up breathing the air that has figured the world because when we treat palpably finite resources as though they were infinite we solicit a kind of murderous fantasy that only ever can be met with mustard gas.