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Ecological and Sanitary - Crisis or Objectivity Crisis?*
'Bruno Latour
Bruno Latour
* Adapted version of a section of a book to be published soon in French under the title Politiques de la nature, comment faire entrer les sciences en dÈmocratie, Paris, La DÈcouverte.
The Trauma of Contaminated Blood In the recent past, there does not seem to have been any other collective experience in France quite as painful as the contaminated blood incident. We have yet to ascertain exactly what this experience means and what lessons we can learn from it. Reading the impassioned opinions that serve as artillery fire ushering in the trial to go before the Supreme Court of Justice, it is baffling to see just how difficult the learning process is.
Fortunately, one model of sociology of knowledge has collapsed: the model that held that certainties circulate like an electrical fluid emanating in a rush without any means of conveyance from a single laboratory, forcing everyone to immediately take a position. We all have to admit today that knowledge of an occurrence—as obvious as it may seem to us just after the fact—only very slowly becomes crystal clear. In other words, that which is evident can not be found at the beginning of a story, but rather at the end. Making the link between an infectious agent and a disease visible to all requires a long, progressive process of ”revelation”, which is a task undertaken by the many institutions defined by social scientists and historians as preconceptions, instruments, schools and cliques, colloquiums and newspapers, media and manuals. The AIDS drama was a violent reminder of something that we already knew—or should have known—from Pasteur or Koch. Moreover, you need not look very far to find pertinent examples: We all know perfectly well that knowing the correlation between tobacco and cancer will not stop us from smoking any more than the mathematical certainty of a link between speed and death will make us slow down on the motor way.
Everyone realises in this whole affair that we must avoid committing the cardinal sin of retrospective error—referred to by scientific historians as ”whiggish” history—which attributes to the past absolute knowledge even though this clarity is only the delayed result of the institutionalisation of common sense. Contemporaries of Copernicus were not all wrong in rejecting heliocentrism when his treatise came out. They certainly did not ignore it out of sheer obscurantism. It was not until much later that one detected in his work the evidence of a system of the world that he himself may not have perceived. So we see that, after all, humanity is not filled with incompetents and bad people that would reject the naked truth right before their eyes because of the ”sociological ponderousness” of institutions. Humanity is filled rather with short-sighted people groping their way along, aided solely by the fragile institutions that they manage to maintain and equip.
Behind every theory of knowledge is a philosophy of history. But this is where it gets complicated: The adversaries of the Supreme Court trial are availing themselves of this new sociology of knowledge that recognises progressive degrees of evidence to vindicate in advance all of the decision-makers during that time. The former, unjust, ”whiggish” version populates the world with voluntarily blind people who resisted the light of truth out of sheer spitefulness; the new version holds that since the light of knowledge was not partial or progressive, we all had good grounds to reject incomplete knowledge and that, as a consequence, everyone is innocent. Looking at it from this angle, the trial is nothing more than belated vengeance to assuage the ancestral need of the masses for a scapegoat. The former model condemns as vile all those who were not wise enough to see what should have been perfectly obvious; the new model only sees vileness in today’s populations thirsting for blood.
The notion that one could vindicate the politicians and administrators because they did not have the total and complete knowledge that we have today, although it may appear to be common sense, is to me quite the contrary: it is terrifying. Terrifying because it proves that the only light we are waiting for to take action is knowledge, that we are confusing the exercise of political power with the application of scientific knowledge, that we are expecting our administrators to be scientists and—something which is perhaps more frightening still—we are insisting that our scientists provide blinding clarity and indisputable facts before the State machine is set in motion. The campaign to clear the ministers reveals the extent to which its proponents can not imagine any other foundation for politics than the assurance provided by scientific certainty. Either we know and in that case we need to take action, or we do not know and then we are right not to do anything. Indeed, old August Comte is not dead yet.
As was demonstrated so eloquently by Marie-Angèle Hermitte (1), the terrible lesson of contaminated blood forces us to abandon both the idea that scientific knowledge is undeniable and the other, equally frightening idea that policies should be based on such knowledge. To the contrary, the State has to be founded on this double uncertainty: the uncertainty of the sciences, which are slow, progressive and controversial, and the uncertainty of politics, which is obliged to grope its way along, learning by experimenting. By confusing the sciences and politics, we forego any chance of gaining knowledge from their double hesitation, i.e. any chance of experimenting collectively.
In order to get there, we have to be aware that the ecological and sanitary crisis goes much deeper and listen attentively to the lessons to be learned from the sociology of sciences.
The Objectivation Crisis One could raise the objection that sociology of the sciences is hardly widespread. It seems difficult to apply as a means of reinventing the shared forms of public life. How could such an esoteric result help us define a common path for the future? Because we are going to combine it with the huge social movement of political ecology, which—surprisingly enough—it will help us to comprehend. Henceforth, anytime that the subject of nature is broached, whether to defend it, harness it, attack it, protect it or ignore it, we will know that this is what is referred to as the second chamber of a public life that some wish to paralyse. So if we are dealing with a matter of political constitution and not at all of naming a part of the universe, two questions arise: Why is it that those who approach us want to have two distinct chambers with only one of them bearing the name ”politics” and what power is it that allows some to shuttle back and forth between the two? Now that we are no longer intimidated by the appeal for nature, we will be able to sort out the traditional from the new, that which prolongs the lowly epistemological police from that which invents the political epistemology of the future.
The result is not long in coming : The literature on political ecology, read with this in mind, is quite deceptive. More often than not, it only repeats, without changing a word, the modern constitution of bifocal politics, one focus calling itself politics and the other, dubbed nature, rendering the former powerless. These remakes can even be amusing when people claim to move from the anthropocentrism of the moderns—sometimes actually referred to as ”Cartesian”—to the naturo-centrism of ecologists, as if since the dawn of the West, since the primeval myth of the descent into the cave, our only thought was to organise life around two centres, one of them being nature. If political ecology poses a problem, it is not because it finally introduces nature into political preoccupations, which, until that point, had revolved too exclusively around humans, but rather because it unfortunately continues to use nature to abort politics. The ecologists have simply substituted a greener, warmer nature for the cold, grey nature of the ancient (political) epistemologists. Other than that, these two natures resemble each other in every way: Amoral, they dictate moral conduct in the stead of ethics; apolitical, they make policy in the stead of politics (2). There is no way around this less-than-charitable judgement if we wish to supply the various ecological movements with a philosophy that is worthy of their ambitions and in keeping with their genuine novelty.
That being the case, why should we concern ourselves with political ecology if its literature just plunges us back into the cave? Because, as we will demonstrate in this second section, political ecology is not about, or rather no longer about, nature, even less about its conservation, protection or defence. In order to follow this delicate operation, the reader must distinguish between the practice of ecological movements in the past thirty years and the theory of this militant practice. We will call the first militant ecology and the second the philosophy of ecology or Naturpolitik (an expression modelled after Realpolitik). It may often seem that we are doing an injustice to the latter, but only because we are so passionately interested in the former.
We are well aware of the danger involved in distinguishing between theory and practice: One could infer that the militants do not really know what they are doing and that they are succumbing to an illusion that the philosopher has denounced. But the reason why we have resorted to this perilous distinction is that the ”green” movement, in its desire to restore nature’s political dimension, has touched upon the core of what we call the modern Constitution (3). Due to a strategic peculiarity that is the subject of this chapter, under the pretext of protecting nature, ecological movements have also preserved that concept of nature which prevents them from waging their political battle. Because ”nature”, as we shall see throughout, is conceived precisely to eviscerate politics; you can not claim to preserve it while at the same time including it into the public debate. Hence, we are certainly justified, in the curious case of political ecology, in speaking of an ever-widening gulf between its abundant practice and its theory.
As soon as we turn our attention to the practice of ecological crises, we immediately realise that they never occur in the guise of a crisis of ”nature”, but rather as objectivity crises: It is as if the new objects that we collectively produce did not fit into the procrustean bed of bifocal policy, as if the traditional ”bald objects” were henceforth clashing with the ”hirsute” or ”dishevelled objects” that the militant movements disperse in their wake. We need this incongruous metaphor to stress the extent to which the crisis involves all of the objects and not just those that have been labelled ”natural”—a label that is just at hotly contested as Appellations d’Origine Contrôlée on a bottle of wine (4). Thus, political ecology is not revealed as the result of a crisis of ecological objects, but rather a generalised constitutional crisis involving all objects. Let us try to demonstrate this by drawing up a list of the differences between what militant ecology thinks it does and what it is actually doing in practice (5):
1. Political ecology claims to talk about nature, but it talks about countless imbroglios which presuppose the participation of humans.
2. It claims to protect nature and shelter it from mankind, but in every case this ”protection” involves humans even more, humans that intervene even more often in a subtler, more intimate way, using scientific equipment that is even more invasive.
3. It claims to defend nature for nature’s sake—and not as a substitute for human selfishness. But every time the mission that it undertakes is carried out by humans for the good, the pleasure or the conscience of a small number of carefully selected humans, generally rich, educated, white, male Americans.
4. It claims to think in terms of systems falling under the laws of science, yet every time it sets out to include everything in a superior cause, it ends up getting dragged into a scientific controversy that the experts are incapable of agreeing on.
5. It claims that it finds its scientific models in hierarchies regulated by ordered cybernetic loops, but it always comes up with astounding heteroarchical assemblies with reaction times and scales that always trip up those who think they are talking about the fragility, the solidity, the size and the modesty of nature.
6. It claims to talk about everything, but it only succeeds in shaking up public opinion and changing the balance of power by attaching itself to places, biotopes, situations, particular events – two whales trapped in the ice, one hundred elephants in Amboseli, thirty plane trees on Montmartre’s Place du Tertre.
7. It claims to be growing more powerful and personify the political life of the future, but it always gets the smallest share of ejector seats and folding electoral seats. Even in countries where it is a little more powerful, it only provides a little secondary support.
Political ecology in practice Now let us take another look at this list, considering those points that seem to indicate weakness in the first model to be positive qualities:
1. Political ecology does not talk about nature and never sought to do so. It deals with associations of beings that take on complex forms: regulations, systems, consumers, institutions, practices, calves, cows, pigs, all broods that it would be superfluous to include in an inhumane and an a-historical nature.
2. Political ecology does not seek to protect nature and never claimed to do so. To the contrary, it seeks to take charge of an even greater diversity of entities and destinies. Whereas modernism claims to dominate the world, ecology gets involved in every aspect of it.
3. Political ecology never claimed to serve nature for its own good, as it is absolutely incapable of defining the common good of a dehumanised nature. It does something much better than defending nature (either for itself or for the good of future humans). It suspends our certainties about the sovereign good of humans and things, of ends and means (6).
4. Political ecology does not know what an eco-political system is and does not proceed based on a complex science, whose model and methods would in any case completely escape our poor, thinking and searching humanity. That is its great virtue. It does not know what constitutes a system. It has no idea what is linked together and what is not. It is precisely the scientific controversies that it gets entangled in that make it stand out against all the other politico-scientific movements of the past. It is the only one that can benefit from another policy of science.
5. Neither cybernetics nor hierarchy holds the key to understanding the unbalanced, chaotic, Darwinian agents, some local, some global, some rapid, some slow, but all of which are revealed by political ecology using a multitude of experimental, original devices that fortunately do not combine to form a specific science.
6. Political ecology is incapable of integrating all of its isolated and particular actions into a total hierarchical programme. It is precisely this ignorance of its totality that is its salvation, because it can never organise in a single hierarchy the tiny humans and the huge ozone layers or the little elephants and the medium-sized ostriches. The smallest element can become the largest. ”The stone which the builder rejected, the same is become the head of the corner” (Mat. 21, 42).
7. Political ecology has fortunately remained on the fringe thus far, as it has not yet grasped either its political or its ecological aspect. It thinks it is talking about nature, the system, a hierarchical totality, a world without man, a certain science, and it is precisely these overly ordered words that relegate them to the fringe, whereas the disjointed words used in practice could perhaps allow it to finally achieve political maturity if it can grasp what that means.
Thus, political ecology can not be characterised as a crisis of nature, but rather a crisis of objectivity. No-risk objects, the bald objects that we were accustomed to up until now, are making way for risk attachments, dishevelled objects (7). Let us try to characterise the difference between the old and the new objects, now that we have rid ourselves of the notion of nature.
No-risk objects had four essential characteristics, permitting us to recognise them at a glance. First of all, the object produced had clear borders, a well-defined essence, widely recognised properties. Without a doubt, it belonged to the world of things, a world made up of obstinate beings, stubborn, defined by the strict laws of causality, efficiency, profitability and truth. Secondly, the researchers, engineers, administrators, businessmen and technicians who designed, produced and put these objects on the market became invisible once the object was finished. The scientific, technical and industrial activity was no longer part of the picture. Thirdly, this "no-risk object” necessarily brought along with it certain expected and unexpected consequences, but always thought of in terms of impact on a different universe comprised of entities that are not as easy to define and were given vague names like ”social factors”, ”political dimensions” and ”irrational aspects”. In keeping with the myth of the cave, the no-risk object in the old constitutional order gave the impression of falling like a meteor bombarding a social world that it used as its target. And finally, some of these objects could bring about senseless risks, even cataclysms. Nevertheless, these consequences, or even catastrophes, never influenced the first definition of the object (its borders, its essence), because they belonged to a world that could not possibly be compared with the world of objects: the world of unforeseeable history, of chaos, political and social disorder, of disarray. Contrary to the impact that could be retraced despite everything, the cataclysmic consequences did not have a retroactive influence on the responsibility of objects, on their definitions—they could never serve as a tool to help their authors learn to modify their properties.
The case of asbestos can serve as a model, as it is probably one of the last objects that can actually be called modernist. A perfect material (it has been known as magic material), inert, efficient and profitable, it took decades for the consequences of its diffusion on health to finally call attention to asbestos, raise questions about it and its inventors, producers, apologists and inspectors; it took dozens of alerts and lawsuits for occupational illnesses, cases of cancer and deflaking difficulties to be traced to their cause and become part and parcel of the properties of asbestos, whose status was slowly changing from that of an inert and ideal material to a nightmarish imbroglio of law, hygiene and risk. This type of object still populates to a great extent the world of common sense in which we live. And yet, like the weeds in a French-style garden, other objects with more extravagant forms are beginning to clutter the landscape by superimposing their own branching out on those on modernist objects.
In our opinion, the best way to characterise ecological crises is to recognise, in addition to the bald objects, the proliferation of these risk attachments. Their qualities are entirely different from the preceding ones, which explains why we speak of a crisis every time they erupt. Contrary to their predecessors, they do not have clear borders, no well-defined essence, no distinct separation between the hard core and its environment. It is due to this trait that they take on a dishevelled appearance, forming rhizomes and networks. Secondly, their producers are no longer invisible, cut out of the picture, but rather in full view, ill-at-ease, controversial, complicated, implicated, with all of their instruments, their laboratories, their workshops, their factories. The scientific, technical and industrial production is an integral part of their definition from the very outset. Thirdly, these quasi-objects, strictly speaking, do not really have the impact that they would have if they were to descend from without onto a world different from themselves. They have numerous connections, tentacles, pseudopods linking them in a thousand ways to beings that are as uncertain as they are and which, consequently, no longer comprise another universe independent of the first. We can not deal with them by putting the social or political world on the one hand and the world of objectivity and profitability on the other. Finally—and this is doubtless the strangest part—we can no longer detach them from the unexpected consequences that they would trigger in the very long term, far removed from them in an incommensurable world. To the contrary, everyone paradoxically expects the unexpected consequences that they will not fail to provoke, consequences that are their exclusive property, for which they accept responsibility, which can teach them lessons according to a clearly visible learning process that re-emerges in their definition and exists in the same universe.
The end of nature? The infamous prions, which are the probable cause of mad cow disease, symbolise risk attachments just as asbestos is symbolic of the former no-risk objects. We claim that the growth of political ecology can be traced to the multiplication of these new beings whose existence is henceforth mingled with those of classic objects, which still constitute the foundation of the common landscape (8). It seems to us that this difference between no-risk objects and objects with attached risks, between ”bald objects” and ”hirsute objects” is much more important than the impossible distinction between crises that implicate ecology and those that implicate the economy or society. We are not witnessing the eruption of nature-related issues in political debates, but rather the multiplication of hirsute objects that can no longer be limited to the natural world, that nothing can naturalise any more.
By translating the notion of ecological crisis in this way, we will be able to account for the strangest characteristic of political ecology, a characteristic that runs counter to what political ecology claims to do. Far from globalising everything that is at stake under the guise of nature, the practice of political ecology is recognisable by its ignorance, which finally allows it to ascertain the respective importance of the participants. Political ecology does not shift attention from the human pole to the pole of nature; it shifts from one certainty on the production of no-risk objects (with their clear separation of things and people) to an uncertainty on the relationships whose unexpected consequences could upset all of the rules, all of the plans, all of the effects. What it challenges with remarkable efficiency is precisely this possibility of collecting the hierarchy of participants and values according to a fixed order, once and for all. An infinitesimal cause begins to have a major impact, an insignificant participant becomes central, an immense cataclysm vanishes as if by magic, a miracle product turns out to have nightmarish consequences, a monstrous being is tamed effortlessly. With political ecology, one is always taken aback, struck at times by the robustness of ecosystems and at times by their fragility. Indeed, perhaps it is time we began taking seriously some ecologists’ apocalyptic predictions of "the end of nature”.
(1)
Marie-Angèle Hermitte, Le sang et le droit: Essai sur la transfusion sanguine, Le Seuil, Paris 1996.  back
(2)
It suffices to reread one of the most influential thinkers inspiring the ecologist school, Hans Jonas, to see to what extent he ultimately supports an obligation that the naturalist discourse of times past would never have dared impose, since nature augments the power of causes with its tremendous moral demands (Hans Jonas, Le Principe responsabilité, p.155, 1990). Thus, there are two reasons instead of just one to obey nature: ”In our counter proposal, ‘power’ means allowing the causal effects to spread around the world and then be confronted with the ‘one must’ of our responsibility.” p. 247. back
(3)
There is no need at this point for a precise definition of modernism. It suffices to know that the relationship between science and society offers, in my opinion, the best means of distinguishing between ‘moderns’, ‘premoderns, ‘antimoderns’ et ‘postmoderns’ — on all these points cf. Latour, Bruno (1991), Nous n’avons jamais été modernes. back
(4)
There is a wealth of excellent works on the impossibility of keeping the qualifier ”natural” stable. My two favourites are Chase, Alston, Playing God in Yellowstone. The Destruction of America's First National Park, 1987, and the amazing book on Chicago by Cronon, 1991. On the subject of zoos, cf. Eric Baratay and Elizbeth Hardouin-Fugier (1998), Zoos. Histoire des jardins zoologiques en Occident (XVI°– XIX°). Regarding parks, a particularly enlightening example is provided by my friend David Western (1997), In the Dust of Kilimandjaro. Read the introduction in Charis Cussins (1997), Des éléphants dans le magasin de la science. For France, cf. A. Cadoret (1985), Protection de la nature. Histoire et idéologie, and particularly the fascinating thesis by Danny Tromm (1996), La production politique du paysage: Eléments pour une interprétation des pratiques ordinaires de patrimonialisation de la nature en Allemagne et en France. The ties between patrimonialisation of art and nature are quite evident in reading Dominique Poulot (1997), Musée, nation, patrimoine, 1789–1815. See also the fascinating work on the history of nature in science by Lorraine Daston (1998), The Nature of Nature in Early Modern Europe; Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park (1999), Wonders and the Order of Nature. back
(5)
I refer here to Bruno Latour (1995), Moderniser ou écologiser. A la recherche de la septième Cité. I benefitted greatly from all of the research on the work of Laurent Thévenot : Claudette Lafaye and Laurent Thevenot (1993), Une justification écologique? Conflits dans l'aménagement de la nature, Laurent Thévenot (1996), Stratégies, Intérêts et justifications à propos d'une comparaison France–États-Unis de conflits d'aménagement; which replaces the false debate on nature with the key concepts of proximity and attachment. back
(6)
This is the whole problem of the so-called ”seventh city”, an allusion to the work on moral and political philosophy initiated by Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot (1991), De la justification: Les économies de la grandeur. If there is indeed a seventh city in addition to the six others laid out by the authors, the question then arises as to the boundaries of the village of humanity (Rémi Barbier (1992), Une cité de l'écologie, Olivier Godard (1990), Environnement, modes de coordination et systèmes de légitimité: analyse de la catégorie de patrimoine naturel). back
(7)
This is how I interpret the expression ”risk society” popularised by Ulrich Beck (1992), Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity: ”The artificial production of certainties — bald objects — ultimately produces what he calls ”the artificial production of uncertainties”. Beck definitely does not mean to say that we are running more risks today than we used to, but the consequences are attached to objects in a manner that is prohibited by modernism. A risk object is a ”bald” object to which we then attach its associated risks, its producers, its consumers, and the concomitant parade of scandals and their legal implications; Ulrich Beck (1995), Ecological Politics in the Age of Risk. back
(8)
It seems to me that, at least as far as the French are concerned, the contaminated blood scandal served as an intermediary between the last modernist objects and the first risk objects of ecology. At the time we still believed that we could keep the drama of contaminated blood within certain limits. This is no longer the case with the mad cow epidemic and even less so for the out-and-out war over genetically manipulated organisms. back
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