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A bad book review followed by an announcement. Not that the book is so terrible, it's my unfocused reading of it.
I just finished reading Bruno Latour's Face à Gaïa, originally published in English, then translated to French with some minor changes. Some twenty years ago I read another of his books, Pandora's Hope. If there is something I can recognise across these books, it is Latour's theory of actants, or collectives that include both human agents and objects, although they play a lesser role in the more recent book. I wouldn't expect much from a philosopher (or sociologist of science, as Latour used to call himself) who writes about climate change. Coming up with new clever ways of thinking about things is such a slow method when action is urgent. Or is it? I will admit that thinking the wrong way about things can be disastrous, as so often happens when greenwashed solutions are being proposed.
There's a whole lot of content in Face à Gaïa that I have already forgotten, will soon forget, or have not quite understood. And there are a few striking passages. The first conference mentions the fight against climat sceptics. There is something about Galileo and why 1610 was an important inflection point. Latour distinguishes Gaïa, Earth, Nature, and Globe, in ways I can't explain. Keeling's struggles with measuring CO2 is recounted and James Lovelock's gaia hypothesis is expounded. Lovelock proposed that micro-organisms not only evolve according to environmental pressures but actively shape their environment to their needs. Clearly the kind of idea that resonates with Latour.
The fifth conference definitely lost me (and I suspect it shakes off most readers) with its complicated tables of 'cosmogrammes' and various names for the inhabitants of earth and their different belief systems. The really fascinating idea here comes from Jan Assman, apparently an egyptologist, who writes about the way early religions compared their deities. There was an idea that deities were translatable according to their function and domain of influence: who was in charge of what.
Le fonctionnement des tables de traduction, selon Assmann, consistait à faire passer l'attention du nom propre des divinités à la série de caractéristiques que ce nom résumait dans l'esprit de leurs sectateurs. Si, par exemple, le nom de «Zeus» sonnait aux oreilles comme un terme incompréhensible, on déroulait la liste de ses _attributs_: «Guide des destinées» (Moiragétès), «Protecteur des suppliants» (Ikesios), ou encore «Dieu des vents favorables» (Evanémos) et, bien sûr, «Porteur de la foudre» (Astrapeios), jusqu'à ce que l'étranger lui trouve un correspondant dans sa langue. (p. 195)
Simple but effective principle: don't care so much about names, list the properties of things and your interlocutors will understand you.
The last conference reports on an event in which students gathered in a sort of idealised version of the COP conference. Instead of having representatives of nation states only, there were representatives of air, water, rivers, cities, and so on. It is true that rivers and lakes do not defend themselves, they must be represented. However interesting, the excercise still seems a bit naïve in light of how global politics plays out.
Finally, Latour admonishes against a possible authoritarianism in the name of Gaia.
Le pire peut advenir, en particulier que l'on prenne Gaïa pour la réincarnation de l'ancien État de la Nature. Imaginez cette catastrophe : des élites politiques, scientifiques et religieuses qui feraient de Gaïa la puissance à laquelle il faudrait obéir au nom des vérités indiscutables de l'État, de la Science et de la Religion confondus. «Gaïa exige ! Gaïa veut ! Gaïa demande !» Toutes les puissances du Globe fusionnées dans le plus toxique des amalgames. (p. 358)
Sven Lütticken, in his book Objections, Vol 1, complains that Latour doesn't identify capitalism as the big mischief. True, capitalism is hardly mentioned, even though its growth imperative is intrinsically interwoven into the ecology, as a direct threat against wildlife and habitats.
Then there's also the military industrial complex and NATO's insane spending goals. These stand in direct opposition to attempts to bring down CO2 emissions, as documented in this brief report:
https://www.tni.org/en/publication/climate-in-the-crosshairs
Although Latour occasionally mentions various kinds of warfare, he doesn't even hint at the connection between military spending and climate change, and he is not alone among the eco-conscious to have so little to say about it.
I've experimented with collages of open clip art and stock photos. Collected into a short zine, somewhat related to housing and unexpected mishaps or sub-real adventures.
https://ristoid.itch.io/housing-crisis
More collage work can be expected soon, and also a longer booklet of original drawings.