Академический Документы
Профессиональный Документы
Культура Документы
Anthropocene
Arianne Françoise Conty
American University of Sharjah, UAE
Abstract
In order to explore some of the divergences within new materialism and elucidate
their relationship to actor-network theory, this article will develop Latour’s theory of
agency and then compare it to those new materialists who uphold a ‘flat ontology’
that includes technological tools (Jane Bennett) and those who uphold an animate/
inanimate distinction (Tim Ingold and Eduardo Kohn). In light of the ecological crisis
called the Anthropocene, the dissolution of the animate/inanimate distinction will be
defended in order to address both polar bears and glaciers, coral reefs and clown
fish. Though Latour himself has defended such a dissolution, his political proposals to
address the ecological crisis revert back to the modern and dualist position he has
himself critiqued for so long. Using the gains of actor-network theory, while differ-
entiating a new materialist ecological politics from that of Latour, will be shown to be
necessary in order to find a solution to the crisis of the Anthropocene.
Keywords
agency, Anthropocene, Bruno Latour, matter, new materialism, politics of nature,
technology
grasped and saved unless that other part of itself, the share of things, is
restored to it. So long as humanism is constructed through contrast with
the object [. . .] neither the human nor the nonhuman can be understood’
(Latour, 1993: 136). In this groundbreaking book, Latour describes mod-
ernity as enacting a ‘purification’ of reality, by separating nature and
culture, subject and object, social sciences and natural sciences, creating
what he calls ‘the hideous scenography of mind/world/substance/lan-
guage’ (Latour, 1993: 47). Claiming that ‘we have never been modern’,
Latour’s book sets out to show that objectifying the world from the
position of a subject was always merely a projection, a reification.
Latour’s a-modernism is thus a ‘return of the repressed’ since we are
forced to acknowledge what was pushed below the surface to constitute
what he calls ‘the unconscious of the moderns’ (1993: 37).
New materialism is the name that has been given to the new scholar-
ship devoted to studying this modern unconscious and celebrating what
modernity had repressed. Though the scholars grouped under this head-
ing are extremely diverse, they all seek to celebrate the materiality of our
world and its nonhuman actors. And they all share a common enemy
with Bruno Latour: the dualities set up in modernity to avoid the impli-
cations of the relationality and interdependence of all of matter (subject/
object, nature/culture, matter/mind, human/nonhuman). Because the
human being is no longer understood as exceptional, and set over and
against a world of objects, many new materialists also consider them-
selves to be posthumanist, in order to undermine the humanist under-
standing of exceptionalism that set the human apart from other forms of
life by an unbridgeable ontological chasm. These two enemies are indeed
allies, since it is the belief in humanist exceptionalism that informs the
human subject against a world of objects, human culture against a world
of nature, and human reason against a world of matter. This anthropo-
centric vision is being replaced by a flurry of studies from disciplines as
diverse as biology, physics, cognitive science, information technology,
anthropology, sociology, philosophy, political science, paleontology,
archaeology, primatology, geology and indigenous studies that seek to
show that rather than an autonomous creature somehow standing apart
from material conditions and relations, the human being is part of and
dependent upon a web of material relations. In line with such research,
we can now read about How Things Shape the Mind: In Defense of
Things, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, Evocative
Objects: Things We Think With, Cognitive Life of Things, The Social
Life of Things, The Moral Status of Technical Artefacts, and The
Democracy of Objects, to name only the most catchy titles. Following
Latour in undermining the modern divide between interiority and exter-
iority that differentiated between actors and acted upon in terms of inner
intentions, such studies understand all matter as forces or what Latour
Conty 75
In this way, Latour equates both morality and the law with material
obligation, transforming them from an evaluation and generalization
of values to a relation of power. Thus not only is moral agency no
longer an exclusively human property, but it is no longer a property of
actants as such. Rather it becomes the property of networks, the result of
interactions between many human and non-human actants.
Latour will drive home the point that moral obligation applies equally
to all actants with a critique of Kant’s second categorical imperative,
which he takes as defending the separation between humans as ends
and matter as means.2 Because actants are made up entirely of other
forces, morality reveals a fundamental incertitude regarding ends and
means. This incertitude adds considerable complexity to Kant’s simple
distinction, for, as Latour puts it: ‘If I exist only through the other, who
then is the means and who the end? If I must pass through it, am I its
means, or is it my means? Am I its end, or is it my end?’ (2012: 452). Once
we take into account the ecological crisis of the Anthropocene, the chains
of interdependent agency grow longer, and we are forced to ask ourselves
if ‘this tree, this fish, this forest, this plant, this insect, this gene, this rare
Conty 79
soil, are they my end, or must I become for them a means?’ (2012: 452).
The ecological crisis is thus what he calls in Politics of Nature ‘the general
revolt of the means: not a single entity – whale, river, climate, worm, tree,
calf, cow, pig, brood – will accept to be treated ‘‘simply as a means but
always also as an end’’’ (1999: 211). Using the work of sociologist
Gabriel Tarde, Latour will accuse ecologists of repeating Kant’s mistake,
by extending Kant’s means/ends imperative to living beings, while
excluding the inanimate. Yet until our moral obligations are extended
to the climate and the forest we will not be able to exit the ecological
crisis we find ourselves embroiled in. Rather than being the objective
foundation upon which living beings organize themselves politically, as
modernity would have it, inanimate matter is also politically active, made
up of myriad inanimate actants that influence and interact with living
actants in relevant interdependent ways. As he puts it in Politics of
Nature:
Overcoming the modern distinction between the human and other forms
of life, and replacing such a distinction with the materiality and health of
bodies, is certainly necessary and beneficial. But Bennett’s revalorization
of animate and inanimate bodies contradicts the very physiological ethics
she calls for, and ignores the power relations that ensue from not differ-
entiating the animate from the inanimate, forms of life from inanimate
tools and objects. A chair is not vibrant the way a dog or a daffodil is,
and a vacuum cleaner does not require the same type of care that a
homeless person or an ecosystem does. By not distinguishing between
‘technological and natural materialities’ Bennett anthropomorphizes the
non-living, using language usually reserved for the living – ‘vibrant’,
‘kinship’, ‘healthy’ and ‘enabling’ – to describe inanimate matter.
Bennett has admitted that her work has ‘a touch of anthropocentrism’5
but claims this is essential in order to replace passive descriptions of
objects with active ones. Yet objects can be understood as active,
hybrid agents, without needing to be described in terms of ‘health’ and
‘kinship’. Indeed, Latour achieves precisely this by delegating human
characteristics to the speedbump to further human ends. Why are
‘technological and natural materialities’ treated as equivalent, in light
of the physiological criteria of health she uses to decide what is ‘good
for us’? Does she really think that anthropomorphizing a car as more or
less healthy, and thus more or less alive, is a good idea? There are bodies
that enter into kinship relations, are healthy or ill, enabled or hindered,
and bodies that do not. There are bodies that we treat as means to an
end, and bodies that we do not. Does it really make sense to speak of a
car as having ‘swarms of competing ends’ and should we adjudicate what
is healthy and enabling for the car amongst those ends in order to treat
the car as an end in itself?
82 Theory, Culture & Society 35(7–8)
Semiotic Agency
Other vital materialists have sought to celebrate vibrant living matter by
replacing the modern human/nonhuman distinction with an animate/
inanimate distinction that seeks to expand ethical consideration only to
living organisms. Such studies avoid the shortcomings of Bennett’s
analysis by excluding technological tools and artifacts, but remain
unable to take into account the climates and rivers that Latour’s
theory can account for. Tim Ingold, for instance, holds Latour and
Bennett to account for eliding the distinction between living organisms
and inert matter and flattening all forms of matter to an external expres-
sion of agency or vibrancy. Imagining a discussion between an ant
(Latour) and a spider (himself), spider claims that ‘it is simply absurd
to place a grain of sand and an aphid on the scales of a balance and to
claim that they are equivalent’ (Ingold, 2011: 94). Aphids, he points out,
have nervous systems, which gives them, and all other creatures with
nervous systems, a capacity of ‘attention’ that differentiates the grain
of sand from the aphid, and the spider from a leaf. He writes:
It is due to this attention that humans and spiders and other living beings
can remember what they learn and develop skills over time to adapt to
their environment, and these skills differentiate our actions from those of
inanimate entities. A car or a rug does not have the attentiveness to
context and the perceptual abilities to transform itself in light of this
context in the way that living agents do. And he concludes: ‘To attribute
agency to objects that do not grow or develop, that consequently embody
no skill, and whose movement is not therefore coupled to their percep-
tion, is ludicrous’ (2011: 94). We are the particular animal that uses
technological tools to increase our perception, and thus to modify our
skills to respond to a world that speaks to us through the agency of
myriad living entities, whose voices can be heard and whose health can
be fostered, but only if we are able to differentiate between bodies that
suffer and flourish and bodies that don’t.
Ingold’s analysis points to some important distinctions between per-
ceptive organisms with nervous systems that grow and develop, but his
distinction is unable to take into account what Latour is attempting to
achieve in his discussion of the ‘thing’ that is Gaia. In the age of the
Anthropocene, when ecological concerns have become so crucial for the
survival of the planet, we must develop a politics and an ethics that can
84 Theory, Culture & Society 35(7–8)
engage with polar bears but also with glaciers, with clown fish but also
with coral reefs. So though nervous systems should certainly be an
important criterion to help understand living organisms and develop
animal rights, it is not in itself sufficient to implement a politics and an
ethics for the Anthropocene. The lives of spiders and aphids, as well as
human lives, are to a large extent determined by inanimate forms of
matter that do not have nervous systems, and we must find a way to
account for their agency, their status as ends, and the ways they enter
into an interdependent mesh with living bodies.
Rather than eliminating the animate/inanimate distinction altogether
by focusing exclusively on external agency as Latour does, anthropolo-
gist Eduardo Kohn has found a way to enlarge his definition of life to
include animals, plants and their habitats (he excludes the mineral and
chemical). Kohn’s anthropology ‘beyond the human’ extends thinking,
and with it ‘strivings, purposes, telos, intentions, functions and signifi-
cance’ to entire ecosystems.7 His book How Forests Think: Toward an
Anthropology Beyond the Human describes his field-work in the
Colombian rain forest working with indigenous peoples. In order to
describe emergent meanings that do not revolve around the human, he
uses Peirce’s semiotic system to develop a system of signs to characterize
selves. In this way he is able to convincingly explain what differentiates
living and nonliving matter, and to develop a philosophy of life that
includes not just the animals in the forest, but the forest itself. Because
life is semiotic, and signs have meaning only for selves, a self is a living
organism that maintains an individual form over time. Kohn agrees with
Ingold that such forms ‘learn by experience, which is another way of
saying that, through the semiotic process I’ve been describing, they can
grow’ (2013: 77). He also agrees with Bennett when she states that bodies
are constituted by ‘a composite of many different it-bodies’ (2010: 100)
since he claims that each entity is ontologically constituted of ‘that which
it is not’ (2013: 79). But unlike Bennett he claims that materiality is not
enough to confer vitality (2013: 92), for it is only thinking matter that is
alive. He defines thought as the semiotic ability of form to remember the
past and predict a future, and it is such thought that accounts for vitality
and differentiates animate from inanimate matter. Rather than distribut-
ing agency to matter indiscriminately, Kohn asks us to understand
agency as the unique attribute of animate selves that interpret and rep-
resent the world around them and therefore think: ‘life thinks; stones
don’t’ (2013: 100). Recalling Uexküll’s famous explanation of the life-
world of the tick, Kohn uses the example of the anteater to show that it is
formed by past knowledge of ant tunnels, which are other to it yet essen-
tial to the form it seeks to maintain. Agency should not be attributed
indiscriminately to all action, as it is in a ‘flat ontology’, but rather only
to the action of an organism that ‘acts for itself’ in order to maintain its
form in relation to an otherness that it is not but that it depends upon to
Conty 85
survive and project itself into the future. Anteaters therefore think, since
thought is ‘the product of an expectation – of a highly embodied ‘‘guess’’
at what the future will hold’ (2013: 76), in this case ant tunnels similar to
ones to which it adapted its snout in the past. In his own words:
Where Latour was able to account for climates and rivers by not distin-
guishing between animate/inanimate agency, Kohn accounts for them by
including them amongst the living. Indeed, by developing a theory of
86 Theory, Culture & Society 35(7–8)
A politics and ethics in line with Kohn’s understanding of life would call
for the human being to return to the ecosystems where the politics of
myriad thinking selves is taking place constantly. In such a view, it is
precisely this separation of the human animal from the political and eth-
ical sphere of material relations that has generated the Anthropocene, by
allowing our governments and scientific academies, our industries and
banks, to delegate labour and profit, commodities and pollution, to
those that do not participate directly in the local environments where
politics and ethics, and also life, happens. As Kohn writes:
refuse to see their projections onto nature and would therefore conclude
that ‘For social reasons [. . .] Western scientists require a dualist attitude’
(1991: 102).
It is unsettling and baffling to note that after dedicating his career to
undermining this ‘dualist attitude’, Latour does not question the dualism
intrinsic to the representational democracy that he accepts wholesale and
simply extends to include nonhuman actants. Is not the human delega-
tion and translation of matter into representational political terms by
Western scientists a projection? Likewise, it is both puzzling and disturb-
ing to note the condescension with which Latour refers to Kohn’s
anthropological research, when, in typical modern fashion, he equates
Kohn’s research with ‘old pre-scientific and non-modern myths’
(2014: 5). After a career dedicated to purging science studies of dualistic
thinking, Latour has remained politically modern. Just as in the scientific
laboratory, Latour’s political assembly isolates actants from the contexts
where they interact in groups with other actants upon which they rely,
and takes them into account only insofar as they stand alone in the
individual lab experiment that is democratic citizenship. Yet new materi-
alist scholarship has been contesting such isolated reductionism in fields
as diverse as biology, primatology, physics, chemistry and politics. Frans
de Waal has contested the results of studying living animals in the labora-
tory, for this isolation denatures the actant under study, treating it as an
essential substance that would somehow remain the same when all of the
inter-relational actants upon which it depends have been removed.
Physicist Ilya Prigogine has shown that the generalization of stable
Newtonian physics in terms of reversible and deterministic predictability
has now been proven the exception, the rule being irreversible and
unstable dynamic states of chaos where molecules respond to their envir-
onment as singularities. Mary Midgley and other scholars have contested
the neo-Darwinian approach to biology that reduces environments to
gene determinism for ignoring the connection between the genotype
and the phenotype. And many political theorists have defended an
anti-Kantian anti-liberal political position, showing how group values
(the good) cannot be reduced to individual norms (the right) without
considerable violence.10 In addition to this isolation of actants from
the interdependent contexts of their actions, Latour claims that each
separated actant requires a human delegate in order to be represented
in the democratic assembly. Such a second step forces each actant to
appear exclusively to human actants and only as represented in the sci-
entific and political language of the Western laboratory and Western
democracy. And just as majority politics rules this political system to
the exclusion of minorities, majority power alliances also dictate the
research done in the laboratory. So which actants would actually be
represented in such a system and to whom?
90 Theory, Culture & Society 35(7–8)
Notes
1. Latour borrows this conflation of values and material obligation from soci-
ologist Gabriel Tarde, whom Latour describes as the ‘retrospective founder
of Actor-Network Theory’ (2008a: 20). Tarde describes value as ‘a quality we
attribute to things’ and thus as quantifiable (cited in Latour, 2008a:18). When
Latour attempts to create a methodology for quantifying values as intrinsic to
things and networks, he will also borrow Tarde’s strategy of focusing on
differential resistance, or what he calls ‘gradients of resistance’ (see Tarde,
PE-1: 258–9, cited in Latour 2008a: 91).
2. ‘Only the Kantians leave the poor subject with the crushing burden of becom-
ing moral in the place of the rest of the world – and what’s more, without a
world!’ (2012: 453).
3. See for example his Gaia Global Circus (http://www.bruno-latour.fr/sites/
default/files/downloads/DOSSIER%20GAIA%20oct%202012_3.pdf) and
his 2015 theatre production ‘Make it Work / Theater of Negotiations’
(http://www.cop21makeitwork.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/DP-MIW-
92 Theory, Culture & Society 35(7–8)
‘What Indigenous legal orders (ontologies if you must) bring to the table is
an acknowledgement that we have reciprocal duties to the land, to the other-
than-human. And in those duties, there are responsibilities not to destroy
entire watersheds, pollute whole lakes, raze mountains for ore. Because
there are real legal-governance, social, cultural, living consequences to
those actions [. . .] Indigenous legal orders, the little bit that I can claim to
understand of them, orient us to a much more accountable legal-governance
relationship between all things/people/beings.’
10. See De Waal (2006, 2009); Ilya Prigogine (2008); Mary Midgely (2010); for a
communitarian politics see Michael Sandel (1982), Michael Walzer (1983),
Alasdair MacIntyre (1986) and Charles Taylor (1979).
11. See Stephen Shapin (1988: 542) and Olga Amsterdamska (1990: 502).
12. See Tim Ingold (2008).
13. ‘The Moderns here refers not necessarily to a group, say ethnic Europeans,
but to those that, in some way or another, subscribe to modernization. And
modernizing is the problem for Latour, it is the way in which humans –
whether in the guise of capitalism, human exceptionalism, or progress – have
become a force that threatens to destroy the plurality of modes of being. His
diplomatic effort is part of a critical project that would see ‘‘ecologizing’’
among the pluralities of beings as the antidote to modernizing’ (Kohn, 2015:
25).
References
Amsterdamska, Olga (1990) Surely you’re joking Monsieur Latour. Science,
Technology, & Human Values 15(4): 495–504.
Barad, Karen (2007) Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the
Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press.
Bennett, Jane (2010a) A vitalist stopover on the way to a new materialism. In:
Coole D and Frost S (eds) New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency and Politics.
Durham: Duke University Press, pp. 47–69.
Bennett, Jane (2010b) Thing power. In: Braun B and Whatmore SJ (eds)
Political Matter: Technoscience, Democracy, and Public Life. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, pp. 35–62.
Bennett, Jane (2010c) Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham:
Duke University Press.
Bennett, Jane (2015) Systems and things: On vital materialism and object-
oriented philosophy. In: Grusin R (ed.) The Nonhuman Turn. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.
Brey, Philip (2014) From moral agents to moral factors: The structural ethics
approach. In: Kroes P and Verbeek P (eds) The Moral Status of Technical
Artefacts. Dordrecht: Springer, pp. 125–142.
Bunge, Mario (1979) Causality and Modern Science. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Callon, Michel and Law, John (1997) After the individual in society: Lessons on
collectivity from science, technology and society. The Canadian Journal of
Sociology / Cahiers canadiens de sociologie 22(2): 165–182.
Collins, Harry (2010) Humans not instruments. Spontaneous Generations: A
Journal for the History and Philosophy of Science 4(1): 138–147.
94 Theory, Culture & Society 35(7–8)
Latour, Bruno (1998) How to be iconophilic in art, science and religion. In:
Jones, Galison (ed.) Picturing Science Producing Art. New York:
Routledge, pp. 418–440.
Latour, Bruno (1999) Politiques de la nature: comment faire entrer les sciences en
de´mocratie. Paris: La Découverte.
Latour, Bruno (2002) Morality and technology: The end of the means. Theory,
Culture & Society 19(5–6): 247–260.
Latour, Bruno (2003) What if we talked politics a little? Contemporary Political
Theory 2: 143–164.
Latour, Bruno (2004a) Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into
Democracy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Latour, Bruno (2004b) Why has critique run out of steam? From matters of fact
to matters of concern. Critical Inquiry 30: 225–248.
Latour, Bruno (2004c) Whose cosmos, which cosmopolitics? Common
Knowledge 10(3): 450–462.
Latour, Bruno (2005) What is given in experience? Boundary 2 32(1): 222–237.
Latour, Bruno (2007) Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network
Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Latour, Bruno (2008) Ecologie et démocratie: pour une politique de la nature
(Agora Conference, 18 January). Available at: http://www.agorange.net/
Conf_bruno-Latour.pdf.
Latour, Bruno (2011a) Gaia global circus. Available at: http://www.bruno-
latour.fr/sites/default/files/downloads/DOSSIER%20GAIA%20oct%
202012_3.pdf (accessed 20 September 2018).
Latour, Bruno (2011b) Waiting for Gaia. Available at: http://www.bruno-
latour.fr/sites/default/files/124-GAIA-LONDON-SPEAP_0.pdf (accessed 20
September 2018).
Latour, Bruno (2012) Enqueˆte sur les modes d’existence: une anthropologie des
modernes. Paris: La Découverte.
Latour, Bruno (2013a) Facing Gaia (Gifford Lectures). Available at: http://
www.bruno-latour.fr/node/487 (accessed 20 September 2018).
Latour, Bruno (2013b) Biography of an inquiry: On a book about modes of
existence. Social Studies of Science 43(2): 287–301.
Latour, Bruno (2014) Agency at the time of the Anthropocene. New Literary
History 45: 1–18.
Latour, Bruno (2015a) Face à Gaı¨a: huit conferences sur le nouveau re´gime cli-
matique. Paris: La Découverte.
Latour, Bruno (2015b) Make it Work / Theater of Negotiations. Available at:
http://modesofexistence.org/make-it-work-theatre-des-negociations/
(accessed 20 September 2018).
Latour, Bruno and Lépinay, Vincent Antonin (2008) L’e´conomie: Science des
interets passionne´s. Paris: La Découverte.
Law, John (1999) After ANT: Complexity, naming and topology. In: Law J and
Hassard J (eds) Actor Network Theory and After. Oxford: Blackwell.
Morton, Timothy (2010) Interviews: Graham Harman, Jane Bennett, Tim Morton,
Ian Bogost, Levi Bryant and Paul Ennis. Speculations 1(1): 84–134.
Povinelli, Elisabeth A., Coleman, Mathew and Yusoff, Kathryn (2017) An
Interview with Elizabeth Povinelli: Geontopower, biopolitics and the
Anthropocene. Theory, Culture & Society 34(2–3): 169–185.
96 Theory, Culture & Society 35(7–8)
This article is part of the Theory, Culture & Society special section on
‘Questioning New Materialisms’ (TCS 35(7–8), December 2018), edited
by Charles Devellennes and Benoı̂t Dillet.