Politics of Nature : How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy

Rating:
Summary: The new politics
Review: If you're not well disposed towards Latour, it can't be because he didn't go out of his way to win you over. He writes so clearly and is at such pains to help alleviate the gross misunderstandings his work attracts, that it can only be spite that fuels the science warriors. This is another groundbreaking book, and another presentation in some ways of the thought of Michel Serres, in slightly less obtuse prose and with Latour's own marvellous conceptual innovations thrown into the mix. Serres may well one day be recognised as the person who most understood what the world in our times is about, but probably not as a result of his own books, which scare people. Latour's taking up of the baton from Serres into new areas is easily the best entry point to this vital tradition of thought.

The title and cover blurb would have you believe Latour has restricted himself here to a chat about political ecology. In reality that's only a springboard to analysing two much bigger questions: how do we best construct democratic bodies, and then how should we govern them? As in his earlier work, Latour shows that it is the objects and devices we use which are the great black hole in our thought, and when we conceive of democratic bodies it's as a great mass of people, and not much else. Importantly, because Latour has always said, and continues to here, that what does most of the work of holding these bodies together is the objects and machines they create and use, he proffers the word 'collective', a less human-centric term, to designate any 'social' body. This is a term very similar in its meaning to Pierre Levy's usage in 'collective intelligence' - both Levy and Latour draw from Serres here.

As technologies have grown in scale and complexity, noting that `technologies' for Latour are institutions, including all of the humans that are required for their functioning, they've reached a threshold whereby `global' processes such as climate are also affected. Once past this threshold the results, for example ozone depletion, are not at the usual localisable scale, but rather force us to act for humanity as a whole, as effects become non-localisable. (Serres says that this marks the beginning of an `objective morality', where actions are forced upon us and morality therefore undergoes a type of phase change, from reasoned choice, to navigation through objective exigencies). Our collective of humans and non-humans, now a sort of tectonic plate of its own, and its politics must now take these planetary factors into account - thus the birth of political ecology. Political ecology because it's not just a case of "who's going to miss a few species of butterfly?", but also, "who turned up the heat?" Global warming, and other stonking great collective objects, and the problem of what we are going to do about them. And who or what is this we?

This we is the collective. It's quite possible to read the paragraph above and think you're seeing the standard environmentalist argument that has become common in the past couple of decades i.e. humans have tampered with the planet, and now must act to save the planet and themselves. But this misses the crucial difference Latour introduces: there are more non-humans in this we than humans. We share the problems with the objects; politics isn't just humans deciding on human problems anymore, because these global objects force their way into our parliaments, demanding attention. Our parliaments are now collectives of humans and non-humans. This has happened because in the past we've ignored the profound co-creation of man and machine, and it's only now that hundreds of years of this co-creation have produced global scale technological effects, which force themselves upon us, that we can suddenly realise what's been missed. Latour uses this historical outbreak of political ecology to then retrofit political philosophy in general i.e. how should we have been doing politics in the first place with objects, not just now when they're forcing us to consider the question; thus political ecology merely as a launch pad to the main topic of the book, which is nothing less than a reinvention of political philosophy.

Latour proceeds to analyse what he calls the `skills of the collective', needed for governance of any group. He then shows how, with a little tweaking, traditional concerns such as science, politics, economics, morality and administration can be used to provide all of these required skills. This will however require a different mode of operation for each of these areas, one more attuned with the need to incorporate objects correctly in our collectives.

There's a summary of the argument compressed into only a few pages at the back of the book, if you're not sure about reading the whole thing. This review hasn't even touched upon the central role of the fact/value distinction to the argument, a longstanding academic trope that Latour completely demystifies in the process of breathing new life into the essential democratic concept of the separation of powers. A book to buy and read, again and again - use your Science Wars texts to wrap the fish and chips.