Debates & Dialogues

Theory, Culture & Society

2019, Vol. 36(7–8) 215–230
A Conversation with ! The Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/0263276419867468

Nikolaj Schultz: journals.sagepub.com/home/tcs

Reassembling the
Geo-Social
Jakob Valentin Stein Pedersen
Roskilde University

Bruno Latour
Sciences Po Paris

Nikolaj Schultz
University of Copenhagen

Abstract
Including empirical examples and theoretical clarifications on many of the analytical
issues raised in his recently published Down to Earth (2018), this conversation with
Bruno Latour and his collaborator, Danish sociologist Nikolaj Schultz, offers key
insights into Latour’s recent and ongoing work. Revolving around questions on political
ecology and social theory in our ‘New Climatic Regime’, Latour argues that in order to
have politics you need a land and you need a people. This interview present reflections
on such politics, such land and such people, and it ends with a call for a sociology that
takes up the task of connecting the three by investigating what he and Schultz call ‘geo-
social classes’. The interview was conducted by Jakob Stein in Paris in November 2018.

Keywords
actor network theory, class, ecology, Latour, modernity, politics, social theory

Introduction
Bruno Latour’s contributions to the human and social sciences are as
many as they are original. Having first increased our understanding of
the networks of translations through which scientific facts are con-
structed, spread and stabilized (1987, 1993a; Latour and Woolgar,
1986), Latour (2005) then reconstructed sociology as the science

Corresponding author: Jakob Valentin Stein Pedersen. Email: jvsp@ruc.dk

Extra material: http://theoryculturesociety.org/
216 Theory, Culture & Society 36(7–8)

redescribing the hybrid chains of associations between human and non-

human beings (‘actor-networks’) that make up collectives. Such rede-
scriptions were necessary, argued Latour, since modernity’s reductionist
distinctions between the natural and the social, the object and the subject,
made it impossible to recognize and institute the plurality of beings
existing in the world. The ‘modern constitution’ made it impossible to
describe ourselves and to protect the values and institutions we hold dear
(1993b, 2013), something becoming even more urgent in the
‘Anthropocene’ epoch, where the growing climatic mutations force us
to reset modernity and to face Gaia (2016, 2017a). In his recently pub-
lished Down to Earth (2018), Latour argues that our ‘New Climatic
Regime’ urges us to reorient politics towards the ‘terrestrial’.1 In this
conversation, offering key insights into his recent and ongoing work,
Bruno Latour and his collaborator, Danish sociologist Nikolaj Schultz,
elaborate on some of the analytical prospects and difficulties of this
reorientation. Latour argues that in order to have politics you need to
define a corresponding land and people. The interview includes reflections
on such politics, such land and such people, and the conversation ends
with a call for a sociology that takes up the task of connecting the three
by investigating what Latour and Schultz call ‘geo-social classes’.

Politics
Jakob Stein (JS): To begin with, I would like to talk to you about
politics in the Anthropocene. Bruno, in your most recent book Down
to Earth (2018), you argue that we have entered a ‘New Climatic Regime’
that necessitates a ‘terrestrial’ reorientation of politics. How would you
describe this ‘New Climatic Regime’?
Bruno Latour (BL): With the word ‘regime’, it is clear that we are not
just speaking about physical conditions, but also about legal conditions,
constitutional conditions, etc. So this word – a hybrid of law, organiza-
tion and physical situation – allows me to avoid the disputes surrounding
the term of the ‘Anthropocene’. The Anthropocene is a good term and
I have defended it, but it is inescapably engaged in disputes between
geology and the social sciences. The term was invented by climatology
and then criticized by the social sciences,2 because it is unspecified in
terms of ‘social conditions’, which is true. And I think you cannot
escape from this dispute. In this context, I use the notion of a ‘New
Climatic Regime’ to say that we are in a new situation which has no
political order; it is not represented in any durable form of institutions
since we are still nation-states occupying territories, not being impacted
by the ecological mutation which will change our constitutional defin-
ition of the political order. So we are in between orders, and this is what
is designated by New Climatic Regime. It is a term that clearly says that
the ecological mutation is a political, physical and legal question.
Stein Pedersen et al. 217

JS: It seems difficult for people to understand how important our entry
into this New Climatic Regime is. If you were defending your own life,
you would do it right away. But it somehow takes a long time for people
to get convinced to protect the climate. Why do you think it is so difficult
to engage people in defending the earth?
BL: Because we have a long history of having rendered the earthly con-
ditions invisible. One could say that when something as important for
any polity as what happens to the land on which you reside, the thing you
care for, is threatened, then there should never have been an ecological
crisis in the first place. Immediately, at the first sign of the crisis we
should have done things. This would have been a normal way of behav-
ing. But we are inheriting a history of 200 years of euphemizing and
making invisible the material conditions of existence on which we rely.
When we see the ecological crisis arriving, we do everything to delay or
deny the situation, because we have learned that this was a question
outside of our social order. But the fact that the earthly conditions
come back and reinsist on being the most important aspect of the
social order – which is actually very classical politics, since to have pol-
itics you need a land and you need a people – makes us very surprised. So
I think it is momentary. It is a transition which is in a way going very
fast, since everybody knows now that it is the essential problem. But it is
still difficult to fit into the classical definition of politics, because it does
not fit with the nation-state, etc. So there are all sorts of characteristics
that explain the indifference. There are also theological reasons.
Nikolaj Schultz (NS): As well as scientific or epistemological reasons.
When we are investigating if the concept of ‘territory’ can be a useful
trope for politicizing these questions, then it also has to do with us still
trying to get rid of the notion of ‘nature’ as invented by modern science.
As Bruno and others have argued for many years, the concept of ‘nature’
has been at the heart of our climate action paralysis, because it refers to
something ‘out there’, with its ‘own laws’, completely detached from the
social order. As opposed to ‘nature’, the concept of ‘territory’, we hope,
is something that allows us to get the earthly conditions back under our
feet, instead of having it out there, distanced from us. As Bruno writes in
Down to Earth (2018), we need the sciences but without the ideology of
‘nature’.
JS: My next question relates to this answer. In Down to Earth, one of the
principal arguments is that we must move towards a ‘terrestrial’ territory.
Why is the political term ‘the terrestrial’ important?
BL: There are many reasons. One of them is that the terrestrial ‘thickens’
the number of agencies that are at work in the world. Territory in the old
17th century definition is seen at a distance, it is flat as in cartography
and it legally defines: ‘This is my part, this is your part’. It has all sorts of
218 Theory, Culture & Society 36(7–8)

consequences for understanding how relations can be made. So, the ter-
restrial that we are speaking about is still a lump of earth, but it does not
have the same components, you do not look at it from above, you are in
it, and it is that out of which you grow your conditions of existence. And
finally, the New Climatic Regime makes another move, which is that the
earth is reacting to our actions. This was always known at the local level;
people knew that if you plow a field too often the soil will disappear, etc.,
but it was not known at the level of the earth system. So the key differ-
ence is that the terrestrial is engaged in very different definitions than the
local and the global, because the earth as a system is now modified, and
that makes a big change. And this means that the whole question of how
one relates to this land on which you live is in dispute. When you begin to
realize that these are the conditions necessary for your existence, then it is
not the same land you speak of. Not least because we have been used to a
situation where you have a nation-state, in Western society organized
since the 17th century or so, but then there is another land which is the
land out of which you grow and find all the sources of your wealth. This
is what the French philosopher Pierre Charbonnier calls the ‘ubiquity of
the Moderns’ (2019); they live on one land, but they simultaneously
occupy another land. Denmark? Denmark is not in Denmark, it is every-
where it draws its resources from!
NS: Right. And it is needless to say that precisely this ‘elsewhereness’ or
‘ubiquity’ that Charbonnier argues keeps the moderns spatially disori-
ented, this strange disconnection between the ‘official’ nation-state terri-
tory and the ‘real’ territory from which these nation-states feed off, is
something the so-called ‘non-moderns’ already know the consequences
of. Simultaneously as the moderns constructed their political autonomy
of the state, the ‘others’ saw their land being grabbed, their territories
being occupied and used to extract resources. So they know very well
the loss of territory, they know very well the feeling of ‘territorylessness’.
The new thing is that we, the moderns, are experiencing this as well. On the
one hand, because the global dream of modernity, or the modern dream of
the global if you prefer, is no longer a realistic horizon for politics.
It suffices to read three pages of the IPPC reports to know that this
dream is impossible. On the other hand, because the nation-state of
Denmark, to stick with this example, which we thought of as autonomous
but which was indeed constructed by feeding from elsewhere, is now being
deconstructed from elsewhere – climate change being the most obvious
example. So, we are all in a lack of territory. And this is directly related
to the importance of the political term ‘the terrestrial’ because this
common loss of territory is what urges us to reorient politically.
JS: Related to the discovery of the terrestrial, it seems that there has been
a change in the role of scientists, some of whom now leave the ivory
tower in order to participate in climate activism. In Denmark, for
Stein Pedersen et al. 219

example, we have recently seen more than 300 scientists making a public
statement on climate change to put pressure on politicians. What is the
role of the scientists and intellectuals in general in the orientation of
politics towards the terrestrial?
BL: The public existence of the situation is coming from the sciences.
None of the citizens would have understood what happened without
the scientists. It is also one of the problems of your first question on
why it is so difficult for people to absorb the situation: climatic mutations
are not something you see. So the sciences are at the center of the insti-
tutions through which we assemble the situation. And simultaneously,
the scientists are attacked. Now they are fortunately slowly getting out of
their old mood where they were saying ‘We are just scientists, we don’t
want to intervene, we are under the oath of objectivity’, etc. They get out
of that mood because they realize that precisely because they have a main
responsibility in showing the situation they also have a very important
responsibility in forming it into policy. Not necessarily into law, but into
policy. Every time you state something about the disappearance of
insects you cannot just say ‘Well, I’m sorry, I’m just showing the dis-
appearance of insects and then I go back to my lab’. It is unthinkable,
because if the insects disappear you disappear as well. So it is a good
thing that the scientists are realizing that the old distinction between facts
and values is gone. It does not mean that they need to politicize their
science, because they still need to do what scientists do, which is to prove
what they say. But they are especially important now, in joining the
citizenship in this new regime, in being with politicians, activists, artists,
etc. Not withdrawn from the public sphere, but in there, with their special
skills, proving with their instruments the existence of the situation.
NS: In Denmark we have a recent example of how this question remains
dangerous. Recently, Theresa Scavenius, a political scientist from the
University of Aalborg, joined The Danish Green Party Alternativet, in
order to run for parliament. She was attacked from all parts of the pol-
itical spectrum, because she is a scientist and therefore ‘not supposed to
do politics’. On this topic, I still think the only reasonable thing to do is
to show that it is not that science is now being politicized because of
climate change, but that there has always been if not politics then values,
beliefs, interpretations, etc., in science. So, the distinction between facts
and values which the suspicion of scientists being politically active rests
on is built on an abstract, ideal type of science that never existed in
practice. This is basically what science and technology studies (STS)
have been showing the last 40 years.
BL: Yes, it is the end of a hypocrisy. However, it is not the same for all of
the sciences. For particle physics the question of politics might not be so
important. But all the sciences engaged with the ‘critical zone’, under-
stood as the thin outer skin of the earth, ranging from the top of the
220 Theory, Culture & Society 36(7–8)

canopy to the bedrock, where all life is modified and flourishes, are by
necessity part of the agora.
JS: Right. And inside the agora, they are facing the citizens. Next month,
a group of concerned citizens in the UK are planning a campaign of mass
civil disobedience, including several thousands of people, who say they
are ready to get arrested to draw attention to climate change. What are
your thoughts on civil courage in the formulation of terrestrial politics?
BL: If my and Nikolaj’s claim that the New Climatic Regime is resur-
recting and intensifying the ancient, two-centuries-old socialist move-
ment and its struggle against injustice is true, then the direct
consequence is that this new movement should have the same sort of
energy put into it. Street movements and demonstrations are only one of
the many ways that this energy has been practiced in the past. So far,
most marches for the climate have been practiced in the old sense of ‘You
should get out of your own egoism and be interested in the climate, which
is something of higher importance than your own little interests’. But the
demonstrations we are going to see are very different. They are not going
to be about moving away from self-interest; rather, they are self-inter-
ested – and that is more interesting! It is a good omen, and the same is
true of the legal cases in Holland, America and even in France, where
young people attack the state for not protecting their own lives. This is
very good. Arriving at self-interest is a good sign.
NS: Not only do you begin to arrive at self-interest, you also move
towards dissensus, which I think is good. In Felix Guattari’s Three
Ecologies (2000), he speaks of ‘collective dissensus’ which, on the ques-
tion of the climate, is a lot more useful than the idea of some kind of
climate consensus, which through the help of rational, objective science
one day will make us arrive at a final unification. Climate change con-
sensus will never exist: there will always be denial and disagreement, not
despite the fact that climate mutation is real, but because of the fact that
it is real – and because the price is too high to pay. Then dissensus is
better.
BL: Yes, that is very true.
JS: So there is a lot of potential in these movements, but may there also
be a risk of them being radicalized?
BL: It will be the same as the socialist movement. You will have the
whole amalgam between the bomb-throwing anarchists and socialists
working for the state. The sea change is when people begin to take it
as a question of self-interest. But what Nikolaj says is important to stress,
because it is not in the sense of ‘Oh, we finally agree that the question of
nature is the most important’, but rather in the meaning of ‘We dissent
about the way you occupy our land and want to live on it’. This is a
Stein Pedersen et al. 221

completely different type of motive, and we know this motive has the
energy to solve the problems. The other motives make no difference
whatsoever. People will simply say ‘Yes, yes, the planet is in danger, it
is not my problem’.

Land
JS: As you said earlier Bruno, ‘To have politics, you need a land and you
need a people’. In continuance hereof, I would like to speak a bit with
you on the questions of ‘place’ or ‘land’, which these struggles of terres-
trial politics revolve around. Maybe a way to get there would be talking
about President Donald Trump. In Down to Earth (2018), you argue that
Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris Agreement is a declaration of cli-
matic war. Elsewhere, you have stated that we should declare war, so we
can reach the moment of diplomatic encounters faster. Can you try to
elaborate on these two arguments?
BL: On the question of diplomacy, it is what Nikolaj just said about
dissent. The questions of ecology are not questions on which we can
assent easily. All of our interests are divided when it comes to coal,
wind, water, etc. And since it is impossible to directly agree, it is better
to say ‘We are at war, you are occupying my territory and I am occupy-
ing your territory’ and explicitly declare that this is a situation of dissent.
Then we can begin negotiating faster than if we say that it is a question of
the disharmony of the planet proven by objective science. The other
question you pose has to do with the solution of geopolitics that
Trump has chosen and Bolsonaro probably will choose, which is to
say ‘We simply abandon the question of international politics’. It is
nationalist in the sense of saying ‘We don’t care what happens to the
other nations’, which is a strange, new definition of this concept.
Nationalists normally say ‘We protect our space’, but not ‘We don’t
care for the others’. And on top of that, the original solution provided
by Trump is to say ‘I abandon the question of being on earth, I am not
on the same earth as you the Europeans, the Chinese’, etc. This is com-
pletely new. Nobody ever dared say that before.
JS: I was going to ask about Bolsonaro, who has been called ‘The
Brazilian Trump’. He said he would like to withdraw from the Paris
Agreement as well and he does not seem to care much about the
Amazon rainforest. In a terrestrial perspective, should it not concern
all of us when the people of Brazil elect a leader who does not care
about the rainforest, which is in a way the land of all of us?
BL: Yes. Some Brazilians really hate the argument that we ‘own’ Brazil,
because Brazil is one of the ways we breathe. So it is a question of fight
and solidarity. It is the same with the US and the fact that they have left
us with the CO2 problem without bothering. It is a declaration of war.
222 Theory, Culture & Society 36(7–8)

But in the case of Brazil it is even more telling, since we, the ubiquitous
moderns, live off Brazil.
NS: It is a terrible responsibility.
BL: Yes. The issue introduces the question of solidarity between over-
lapping entities, which is at the heart of the New Climatic Regime. Your
territory is actually my territory. When you pollute, you are invading my
land. Again, the whole overlapping of ‘property rights’, so to speak, is
being re-disputed in the New Climatic Regime. And I think that is one of
the important legal aspects of the word ‘regime’. In a terrestrial perspec-
tive, yes, we should all have our say on the Amazon forests.
NS: Bruno, do you think that this is a problem of scale? If it is true that
some Brazilians are terrified of being ‘the lungs of the world’, is the
problem then that one jumps directly from a ‘small’, ‘local’ forest to
breathing for the rest of the world, for the ‘globe’ – instead of explicating
or describing all the territorial independencies that escape these two
figures?
BL: Yes, because, for example, the Amazon lives off sand, blown by the
wind from the Sahara desert. There would be no forest without the wind
blowing from the Sahara. This is again a typical case of overlapping
terrestrial entities. But Bolsanaro and Trump do not have a political
project. They simply get rid of constraints. I think it is the first time
we have politics defined by not doing politics. The only sort of slogan
is ‘We stop having limits, we do not care anymore, I speak whatever
I will, I treat you as I will’, etc. This is new. The only antecedent we
have was fascism, and they were tough, but they would not have said that
they had no civilizing project.
JS: How does the rise of authoritarian regimes affect the global society’s
ability to work together and find solutions in order to deal with climate
change?
BL: They are not authoritarian regimes, they are regimes simultaneously
much more globalist and much more nationalist, which is a very strange
combination. They basically say ‘We abandon all constraints on indus-
try, no anti-pollution’, etc., and simultaneously they increase the idea
that they do not care about what happens with the others. So it is two
ways of not internalizing the consequences of your actions. But the prob-
lem is again that no one is in the territory that they live out of. So, in a
way, it is fairly logical that, when you hear there is a generalized earth
crisis, you say ‘Let’s abandon all constraint, let’s go as far away as we
can, and let’s increase the inequality as much as we can. And let us even
abandon the idea that we do politics’! It looks like politics because there
are still people meeting and doing programs, but they know they have no
existence if by politics you mean connecting a people with a land. So,
Stein Pedersen et al. 223

if you want to have politics you need to reorganize and reestablish this
link, meaning that it is an extremely ambitious and careful project to deal
with the ecological crisis, which is indeed terribly constraining. New
regulations on industry, new regulations on food, new understanding
of what it means for a people to invade someone else’s land, new types
of solidarities, etc. The complication is such that America, Brazil and
Italy say ‘Okay, let’s abandon this’. It is in this sense that I think there is
‘post-politics’ even if I do not like the term much.
JS: Is it possible for a progressive geo-social movement to create a con-
structive dialogue with the right-wing movements that want to go back to
the local nation-state? Do they in any way have a common project?
BL: If politics is defined by relations between a land and a people, then it
is something that should resonate with ‘reactionary’ traditions or move-
ments. Originally, the notion of ‘people’ is more of a ‘right-expression’
than a ‘left-expression’, and so is the notion of ‘land’. But again, the
conservative revolutions that we witness are defining the ‘America
Great Again’, the ‘Brazil Great Again’, the ‘Italy Great Again’ in
completely unsubstantive terms. The place or land where these neo-
nationalist countries claim to live has no economic or ecological base.
If you see the negotiations between Brussels and Italy, it is clear that the
promises made have absolutely no connection with any soil. And the
imaginary America of Trump and the imaginary Brazil of Bolsonaro
have no land either. It simply has no existence economically or ecologic-
ally. And this is why we have to very quickly do the work of reconstitut-
ing the land under the feet of people. This is where things can be
accelerated and politics can come back. If you ask people ‘What is the
territory that allows you to subsist?’, at first, people immediately realize
that they have no way of describing this territory and they are completely
lost. Afterwards, they feel excited and regrounded. And if they have a
ground, a land, a territory, they begin to have interests. And if they have
interests, we begin to have politics. So it can and it will shift very quickly.
If not, we will all be doomed. Brexit is a good example. What happens in
England now is really interesting, because you see how people begin to
realize that Brexit is a catastrophe in terms of conditions of existence.
You see people who are deeply depoliticized, completely seized by the
idea that you need no attachments, suddenly realizing that if you are cut
out of Europe then you are nothing much. Because now people are
talking concretely: with Brexit, these universities are going to disappear,
these jobs are going to disappear, etc., and we have been completely lied
to about what it is to be somewhere, in England, in the place of nowhere.
NS: They have a crazy story of inventing other places. They invented
globalization! But I am sure you would agree that the fundamental idea
behind Brexit, the idea of belonging, of connecting to a place, of belong-
ing to a land is not an illegitimate way of wanting to be in the world. The
224 Theory, Culture & Society 36(7–8)

problem is just that this land – England without Europe – is not there,
it is a non-place, a land with no economical or ecological foundation,
a place with no material conditions of existence.
BL: That is why the problem of description is so important. Because it is
true that this was the idea of Brexit, that you would finally be connected
to your land when the borders had been restored. But then you realize
that this land is a non-existing land, precisely because it is separated.
Brexit is the ideal case of a territorial redescription, since they are
now slowly listing all the connections that their conditions of existence
depend on.
NS: It is why the job of description is important and, in continuance
hereof, why it is important to have a new concept of what it means to
belong to a place. It is true that if the only place one imagines as a place
of belonging is a place that no longer exists – the hardcore Brexiter’s
England or isolated nation-states in general – then we are in trouble. On
this topic, geographer Doreen Massey’s (1991) work on progressive
places of belonging is interesting. As an argument against belonging,
necessarily being understood as reactionary, she tried to show, through
descriptions, how the atmospheres and existence of local places that
people rightfully feel attached to always transcend their cartographic
definitions. Kilburn, her hometown, had many identities; it was
moving, and was impossible to define it without taking into account all
its links and connections to other places in the world, etc. Relatedly,
on the topic of England, land and Charbonnier’s argument on the ubi-
quity of the moderns, it is interesting to remember that England tackled
the end of the empire by creating a ‘second empire’: the tax havens. This
is Shaxson’s argument (2011). In the end of the 1950s and the 1960s, as
the empire declined, City of London elites began seeing their fortunes
diminishing. As a response to this, new financial territories were con-
structed, in the Cayman Islands, etc., where British bankers constructed
a set of secret financial laws, jurisdictions and regulations. They created
offshore tax havens, where the wealth was stored. Shaxson reminds us
that 7 out of the 14 remaining British Overseas Territories are now tax
havens. No wonder nobody knows where they are today.

People
JS: Again: to have politics you need a land and you need a people. We
have spoken about politics and we have spoken about land. But what
about the people? Relatedly, Bruno, in some interesting chapters of Down
to Earth (2018), you argue that in our New Climatic Regime we need to
redefine our understanding of social class. You argue that we should
instead speak of ‘geo-social classes’. What define these classes? How do
Stein Pedersen et al. 225

the notions of social class and social inequalities change shape in a time
of global climate change?
BL: I invented the term of geo-social classes, but Nikolaj did the
research! It is not a very good term, because all these words with hyphens
just mean that we try to bring together two sets of literature, and it would
be better if there were just one. But the idea is that if you look at the
definition of what a social class is, in a classic Marxist materialist way,
and then add the question of what is the land or the territory in which
these classes live, then you can begin to redescribe the ecological situation
of classes. Before, people would have said that ‘The ones suffering from
ecological mutations are also the most downtrodden on the earth’,
but that is a different argument; this is sort of an addition instead.
So it is a generalization of this argument that we collaborate on in
trying to define more precisely this double definition of classes.
NS: The argument is that social classes always have been linked to ques-
tions of the earthly conditions, even if this was not as easy to see earlier
as it is now. Politically, this means that environmental and socialist
movements have failed when they have not been able to create strong
alliances and pose the questions of justice together. There has always
been soil, land and territory entangled in ‘the social question’ posed in
a strictly materialist way – there has always been soil under the factory
and there has always been air, more or less polluted, in the lungs of the
proletariat – but now these entanglements between the social and the
terrestrial questions are becoming intensified. It is this intensification
and its reforming of geo-social collectives that we try to describe.
JS: What would be an example?
NS: One example is that we know that the ultra-rich, ultra-mobile elites
in Silicon Valley are beginning to buy land in New Zealand, simply for
the reason that New Zealand is not expected to be hard hit by climate
change. Here, they are building luxurious climate-secured properties.
New Zealand offers them security and distance from what they them-
selves refer to as the coming ‘climate apocalypse’, the same way as
Switzerland and Uruguay once attracted elites because of secrecy and
private banks (Osnos, 2017). So here we have an extreme case of how the
globally ultra-privileged, ultra-mobile elites are ‘elevating themselves’, to
use Ulrich Beck’s term (2016), over the dangers of a climate-damaged
world, and – perhaps temporarily – reaching habitable soil beyond the
shared condition of losing territory . . .
BL: . . . And in the morning, they plan on going to Mars. Mars missions
in the morning – in case this does not work, they go to New Zealand. The
logic is the same: there is not room enough for all of us here on this
unstable earth, so we abandon the rest.
226 Theory, Culture & Society 36(7–8)

JS: Would that be a geo-social elite?

NS: Yes, except that they are not going to succeed in going to Mars,
which makes it a bit more difficult to investigate empirically, even if the
strategies or motives are the same. But it is true that what at first sight
looks like an ultra-modernist conspicuous consumption a là Thorstein
Veblen (1899) ad astra – let us go to Mars or let us send a sports car into
space circuit for the fun of it – lies the same dream of leaving the rest
behind as the rich survivalists flee to New Zealand. Already in Carl
Jung you would find warnings of this sort of earthly escapism (Jung
et al., 1961).
BL: Yes, the research is easier to do with the New Zealand super-elites,
because they are still territorially dependent. . .
NS: Sure. They are territorially dependent in the way that they too need a
habitable soil under their feet. But they are territorially independent in
the way that their privilege and their mobility allow them to escape tem-
porarily the dangers of climate change and find territory ‘elsewhere’,
beyond the radar. In New Zealand, they can ‘take it easy for a little
while’, as Alex Turner recently penned it in a song about a gentrified
moon colony with four-star restaurants. This is also what Bauman tried
to stress with the concept of ‘exterritorial elites’ in his book Globalization
(1998). That these elites are ‘exterritorial’ does not mean that they do not
need a space to settle. It means that they have a level of privilege and
mobility that allows them to cut all bonds of solidarity and segregate
themselves, leave the rest behind and find space as isolated and detached
from the rest of society as possible. And now what we see is that these
trends are being exacerbated because of the common loss of habitable
soil in our New Climatic Regime. I believe that if we compare the terri-
torial strategies, the territorial interests, the territorial organizations of
such territorially privileged collectives with those of territorially non-
privileged collectives, then we would have a better description of how
today social inequalities are being intensified by and transformed into
socio-ecological inequalities, as well as how social classes are being trans-
formed into geo-social classes. This is what should be studied: what does
the struggle for a habitable territory look like under different geo-social
positions? This would allow us to describe better the class struggle of
today and tomorrow.
BL: Another important aspect of geo-social classes has been demon-
strated by Timothy Mitchells (2011), which is that not only does the
geo-social inequality have to do with the occupation of space, but also
the fact that time is already ‘colonized’, so to speak, by past decisions.
There is not only a stratification in space but also a stratification in time,
which is very important as well when we consider these questions.
Stein Pedersen et al. 227

NS: Yes, related to the geo-social class question there is also the strati-
fication of time. This is not least interesting with regard to all the dis-
cussions of moral philosophy on how to understand the future victims of
climate change. Last year, I wrote a short article on this topic (Schultz,
2017). Some scholars still complain that one of the problems with theo-
rizing climate change, power and justice of the future generations is that
normally our concepts of power see both those exerting power and those
dominated as being present, as existing. That we are not familiar with
having to conceptualize a power relation where those dominated are not
yet alive. I never really understood this argument. First of all, it is a
bizarre idea that the victims of climate change can be limited to future
generations. Try to tell this to people in, say, the slums of Dhaka in
Bangladesh who are already seeing their territory disappearing because
of climate change. But even if we accepted this idea, then I am still not
sure if I understand why we should not be able to theorize power exerted
over future generations. Why should power relations not be able to travel
through time? That power relations travel through time – is this not what
sociology has always showed with concepts such as ‘social heritage’,
‘social reproduction’, etc? I do not think it takes a lot of metaphysical
imagination to realize that our generation and previous generations are
dominating and have dominated future generations’ possibilities of
breathing and living on habitable soils. Unfortunately, it takes more of
an imagination to imagine the opposite. As you say, time is colonized.
In this perspective we maybe need to understand that we, the Western,
modern civilization, was, is and will be a sort of ‘geo-historical elite’,
while future generations, rich as well as poor, Western and non-Western,
will be living in our ruins of capitalism, as Anna Tsing would say (Tsing,
2015), as a geo-historical proletariat. It is not a nice thought, but . . . So
yes, there is definitely a question about stratification of time here which is
important as well. Another interesting aspect of the questions on life
terrain and the stratification of time is how the tech billionaires of
Silicon Valley – funnily enough, the same people as those who are escap-
ing to New Zealand or Mars – are throwing fortunes into longevity
research that will allow the rich to grow older than the poor through
bio- and nanotechnology (Powell, 2019).
BL: Another difficulty is that Marx had the ‘system of production’ to
organize the difference between capitalists, the proletariat and so on. The
problem is that we need to have a framework which is not based on the
system of production, but what I call ‘syste`me d’engendrement’, a ‘system
of becoming’. The system of production is about resources, basically. The
system of becoming is rather about defining the entities that allow you to
live. It requires quite a lot of change in the way that we describe classes
and class struggle, in the end. So there is a lot of work to do.
228 Theory, Culture & Society 36(7–8)

NS: Right. But basically, the idea is ‘just’ to define or map the collectives,
the groups, the people that correspond to these new territorial questions,
in the same way as there was a need of delineating a people that corres-
ponded to the social question in the 19th century. So what is important to
underline when studying the aforementioned different geo-social inequal-
ities and conditions are questions like: Do new social collectives or groups
emerge as a consequence of shared geo-social conditions? Do individuals
sharing either a privilege or a lack of privilege in the struggle for territory
construct a sort of shared moral economy, in the Thompsonian or
Boltanskian sense of the term (Thompson, 1971; Boltanski, 1982)? Are
new, self-conscious collectives or classes emerging on the basis of common
understandings of socio-earthly conditions or socio-earthly injustice?
These are the questions we need to try to answer if we as sociologists
want to understand the coming socio-earthly transformations of modern
societies and the emergence of a geo-social landscape they bring along.
And a sociology studying these transformations will probably end up
being some kind of strange sociology, placing itself somewhere in between
the sociology of associations and a more classical ‘sociology of the social’.
A sociology reassembling the geo-social, maybe?

Acknowledgements
A short Danish translation of this interview was first published under the title
‘Klimakrisen tvinger os til at gentænke alt’ in Dagbladet Information, 8 December
2018, pp. 38–40 (Stein Pedersen, 2018). Reproduced with permission from Dagbladet
Information.

Notes
1. First published in French as Où Atterrir? Comment s’orienter en politique?
(Latour, 2017b).
2. See for example Haraway (2016) and Moore (2016) for such critiques. For a
defense of the term see e.g. Hamilton (2017).

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Jakob Valentin Stein Pedersen is a Graduate Student from Roskilde

University, Denmark, where he studies Social Sciences and Journalism.
He has previously worked at Danish daily Dagbladet Information where
he covered sociology, social theory and philosophy. He has interviewed
prominent thinkers such as Simon Critchley, Olivia Gazalé and Peter
Singer. Currently he is doing ethnographic research on how indigenous
populations in Canada are effected by climate change.

Bruno Latour, Holberg Prize recipient and Professor Emeritus at Sciences

Po Paris, is among the world’s leading sociologists and philosophers.
A veteran of Science and Technology Studies (STS) and originator of
Actor-Network-Theory (ANT), Latour has written more than a dozen of
books including Laboratory Life, We Have Never Been Modern (1993),
An Inquiry Into Modes of Existences (2013), Facing Gaia (2016) and most
recently Down To Earth (2018). Latour is currently preparing an exhibi-
tion ‘Critical Zones’ at Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe (ZKM).

Nikolaj Schultz is a PhD Fellow at the Department of Sociology,

University of Copenhagen, where he is preparing his thesis on ‘geo-
social classes’. He is currently a visiting researcher in Paris, where he is
collaborating with Bruno Latour (Sciences Po, Paris) on this topic. His
research interest revolves around the Anthropocene and its empirical and
theoretical implications for the social sciences. At the moment, he is
editing a book on Bruno Latour’s work (Samfundslitteratur, 2020)
including contributors such as Anders Blok, Pierre Charbonnier,
Gerard de Vries, Graham Harman, Barbara Herrnstein Smith and
Clive Hamilton.