From Dialogue One: “The Rediscovery of the Earth—with Bruno Latour”

Anders Dunker (AD): Historically, the age of discovery is over. Are we none the less in a new age—an age of rediscovery—that can lift our spirits and propel us past the nagging feelings of tragedy?

Bruno Latour (BL): Well, it is my way of being optimistic. It is my way of not taking part in the sense of doom. Scientifically and technically, it is perfectly rational to be a pessimist, but I don’t think it makes much sense politically. Optimism has nothing to do with technoscience—DNA plus cognitive science plus robots plus outer space. Instead it is connected with exploring the world we thought we knew. I will borrow the term from you and call our time period an age of rediscovery, even if it is grandiose. What we call local has quite a different meaning in relation to Gaia than it previously had. It now has many different dimensions. The rediscovery of a place is in some ways a cliché—since ecologists have been talking about the same thing for years—but this concept also leads to a different way of framing the world, it leads to another geometry, so to speak. Water gets another meaning. Ice gets another meaning. Industry is considered in relation to the amount of CO₂ in the atmosphere. We see things in new ways. Antibiotics have a different kind of globalization than weeds, for example.

AD: Traditionally, the concept of the local has had a flavor of subjectivity—existence circumscribed by the immediate horizon—in contrast to the scientific gaze, which purports to see everything as if from outer space?

BL: And here lies the error. The local is objective. The gaze from inside the critical zone is completely objective, it is just objective in a different way. What we see is real, but this reality only becomes visible if we learn what different parties are up to, what they need, what they want, what they can accomplish.

AD: But when we see things from the inside and rediscover our surroundings as a mesh of territories, the question arises: from whose perspective should we see these territories? There is obviously a myriad of lifeforms, both human and nonhuman, with different and potentially conflicting interests. Doesn’t this beg the question of negotiating the right to exist—to be what one is?

BL: For me, the decisive question is this: When one talks about one’s territory, does this territory contain other beings or not? If you define other beings as part of your territory, defending your territory also means defending insects and birds. So there are those who belong to society, as my countryman Émile Durkheim defined it: that is, to an exclusively human society. Such people resist an inclusive definition of their territory containing insects and birds. In this way, there is a struggle between different kinds of cosmopolitanism—or cosmopolitics, if you like—which isn’t really that different from politics as ordinarily conceived. In Norway, for instance, youth protesters are attacking oil interests drilling in the Arctic and suing the government. They are using the law to say, “What you are doing is wrong and constitutes an attack on all of us.” This is politics the way politics has always been conducted. We tend to distinguish between ecological issues and political issues, but this is both strange and mistaken—they are essentially the same.

AD: So rather than speaking about the sixth extinction and global warming in general, we must discover the battleground in our immediate vicinity?

BL: We are drowning in horrible information about global ecological disaster. The net result is paralysis. Some time ago, Le Monde published a warning about climate change signed by 15,000 scientists in big letters on the front page. But what do you do with that? Where do you go from there? People are left with a feeling of helplessness. This is where many environmental thinkers make a mistake. They preach about the end of the world but fail to understand the drama in multiple dimensions. When we only emphasize the tragic side of things, we end up instead in a kind of pedagogic tragedy. It is important to remember the comedic side of things, which is more affirmative. I have collaborated in writing a play about Gaia that is a tragicomedy. Comedy is a way to avoid the rigidity of tragedy. We don’t need more pedagogic tragedies, but rather to start lively debates and to stage possibilities for reality in new ways. Comedy, drama, exhibitions, performances—this is our only way of freeing ourselves from the sense of helplessness.