Literary styles/connections

I would not see literature as being on one side of the divide, but - the semiotic
tradition, at least - as offering a much larger vision of the access to ontology than is
possible with the social sciences, or with the sciences, actually (Arch interview).

how

I've never believed in the difference between figurative and literal. So, in a way, the
work I'm doing now is really on what happens when you don't make that
distinction. But there are several ways of not making this distinction. One of them is,
of course, saying everything is metaphorical, which is not a good solution.

Because as a rule I think we should, in this sector, never use again the literal /
metaphoric distinction, but always make precise the sort of displacement we are
talking about… It's very difficult to invent a position that is before this distinction. If
you say, "well I want to overcome the difference between metaphoric and literal,"
you do it from the side of metaphor - this is the danger of the Haraway type of
discussion about tropes. I think I have a solution to the problem which comes from
the fact of being able to re-describe what it is to be literal, which means on the
contrary a highly transformative type of transportation, which I call the "immutable
mobile," the other way of making transportation - this transformation - visible.
(Arch Interview)

So it's not the multiplicity of point of view, because the multiplicity of point of view
is actually a chain, a transformative chain. [...] The question is not one of multiplicity
of points of view, the question is about the judgment of the accuracy of the account,
and that is of course an open question depending on lots of other things. But it's not
the case that a literary description would be less objective. On the contrary - again,
semiotics shows this very well - we are very good at knowing if a close reading of
the text is accurate or not because we have a text there and what the guy says about
the text.

This is Greimas's great discovery, that objectivity is the inside referent, it's never an
outside referent. So as long as you have the production of an inside referent, it
doesn't matter if it's comparing a brain scan and a piece of text or if it's a piece of
text and another piece of text - the question is whether you have built the internal
referent or not.

Science as a scientific text does not break out of literature by the access to the
external referent. I've shown that in many papers. It breaks it because of a
multiplicity of levels in which the internal referent is produced, and by the graphics
themselves.

In my view, the bottleneck is in the difficultly of describing what happens to agency

when there are no anthropomorphic characters. And there is no vocabulary - no
accepted vocabulary - to talk about that. So every time you do that, immediately
people say - I know because I have done it many times - people say, "Oh, you
anthropomorphize the nonhuman." Because they have such a narrow definition of
what is human, that whenever a nonhuman does something, it looks human, as if it's
sort of a Disney type of animation. So if my "sleeping policeman," actually a speed-
trap, begins to really do something, people say "yes, but you are projecting human
intention onto it," even though it has been made precisely so that there is no
policeman there and there is no human intention there and you break your car if
you speed.

I think that the bottleneck is that we don't know how to define the nonhuman at all.
And thus we don't know how to define the human
(http://archjournal.wustl.edu/node/96).

RHETORIC

The paucity of scruples in a given text seems bound up with the paucity of actors on
the surface of its argument. We might hypothesize that, if a text deals with objects as
if they were certainly objects (and thus inconceivably actors), the text is to that
degree immoral (315).

ON THE IMPORTANCE OF DESCRIPTION

If we have to redo every plank of his proverbial boat which has to be refitted
without ever reaching a dry dock, nothing less will do. I believe it is the
responsibility of Europeans to refuse to live in the ruins of the modernist
scenography and to have the courage, once again, to put their skills to work in
devising for matters of concern a style that does justice to what is given in
experience (What is the Style 50).

Towards a Positive Proposal

But in order to fight all exoticisms, including Occidentalism, one cannot be content
with the negative conclusion that “we have never been modern”. Even though such a
slogan might be liberating at first, it quickly leads to the nagging question: “then,
what the hell have we been?” And this other question raised everywhere by those
“we” have attempted to modernize: “What the hell have you been doing instead?”
(http://www.bruno-latour.fr/node/328)

no matter how rewarding has been the following of those heterogeneous networks
of associations, no matter how fecund has been the redescription of the central
domains of modern societies in term of actor-networks, they have not been able to
offer the positive version of modernism that we were looking for.
(http://www.bruno-latour.fr/node/328)

Political Implications

Politics always was object-oriented. It is simply that in the modernist scenography,

where politics was one sphere amongst others, such as those of civil society,
economy, nature, we were under the impression that we could define politics in a
procedural manner.

Everybody is reactionary today. The problem is not there: the problem is which
ones to choose. The division of things between progressivist and reactionary ought
to be abandoned precisely because the topography of time, the repartition of
political passions, has been overturned. (http://www.re-public.gr/en/?p=129)

The Parliament was there as a particular technique among the multitude of other
hybrid, non-official, not necessarily legitimate forums which are very effective
involving a variety of things: from the supermarket, and finance to law, technology,
debates over nature, etc. Therefore there is a proliferation of “micropolitics”, to use
Urlich Beck’s word. In my opinion the dream of macropolitics, the sphere that could
cover all these forums, has disappeared.

In practice politics was always about “matters of concern”. It was always “issue-
oriented”. The village mayor has always been aggressed or alerted by his co-citizens
on problems of garbage, roads, schools, factories, etc. It is primarily a question of
representation of what always happened in politics, a problem that we could not see
clearly as long as politics was thought of either as covering the totality of activities
(the “everything is politics” of the 1960s) or, in the opposite, as being uniquely
oriented towards the official, parliamentary version of representative government.

This is because either we were within the “everything is political”, a perspective that
was revolutionary without taking into account the institutions of democracy – as we
know, revolutionaries are never good democrats – or we were under the impression
that democracy in its official representative form could absorb all questions that
passed through its procedure and became politics when they arrived at the desks of
ministers or deputies. Suddenly, we pause and raise the issue of democracy
whereas, in effect, people always posed the question of democracy in different ways.
We can take the contemporary situation regarding patient associations, no one
imagined that politics of health would be organized on a one-to-one basis. No one
imagined that food, as it has become in Italy with “slow food”, would become an
object of politics. No one imagined that something like the climate would become an
object of politics. It is a kind of pixelisation of politics. The form of politics has
changed to such an extent that each pixel has its proper autonomy.

ECONOMY - The great obstacle is that we cannot do the same with the economy. It
remains, in the beliefs of the old left and the old right, a system obeying laws in a
way that nature no longer is. The contemporary paradox is that nature is clearly
politicized whereas the economy remains rigid to the extent where laws are put into
effect without anyone being able to express his opinion. It is rare to find the idea
that the same pixelisation can take place in the economy whether within the Marxist
left or the Marxist right. Whereas in practice, of course, the economy is pixels. It
consists of small aggregates, collections, new hybrid forms, etc. It is an amusing
paradox of the era that the economic nature resists more than nature itself.

there is a bit of an exaggeration when we hear about the web as offering the
universal forums that we have lost. The notion of a universal forum is probably a
notion that we should lose. We should not wish to go back to the “global.”

we have also lost the great techniques that ought to still be used today, that of
eloquence, of rhetoric. Instead, we have reached a slightly discouraging amalgam of
governances. This is all the more obvious in the programs presented to us. We are
being asked to imagine that politics is set of programs that we must apply in a
problem-solving fashion. Therefore there is no longer the technique of eloquence or
spin that gives the quality of everyday life to the political.

politics should not be seen as an immense body covering the totality of public life,
but as a passage, as a movement.

It’s the Development, Stupid

He laments that “no matter how important the work that has been done so far,
ecological questions are still taken as peculiar to one specific domain of concerns,
not as the core of politics. Never are these issues treated with the same sense of
urgency and centrality, with the same passions, the same moral energy than the rest
of public issues. At the very least, they don’t mobilize in the same ways the
democratic ideals so essential to the pursuit of civilized life.” (“It’s the development,
stupid” 2)

Blair, Churchill rhetoric comparison (pg. 3)

Just at the time when the promises of science, technology and demography make the
necessary enlargement of politics to nonhumans at an ever expanding scale clear to
all—to the point of engaging the Earth itself in the arenas of political
representation—this is the moment chosen by millions of well-meaning souls to
flagellate themselves for their earlier aspiration to dominion, to repent for their past
hubris, to look for ways of diminishing the numbers of their fellow humans and to
swear to leave under their feet, from now on, the most invisible of footprints. (3)

We “have developed at an incredible speed and scale,” he goes on. Very well. How on
Earth could you stop to do so at an ever expanding scale and speed? Now is just the
time you should develop more not less. Or else, don’t expect for a second to be
followed by anyone but a few ascetic souls—just when you need the billions behind
you. (4)

instead of deciding that the great narrative of modernism (Emancipation) had

always resulted in another history altogether (Attachments), the spirit of the age
decided to interpret the dissonance as a contradiction between good that had
turned bad, and began to exclaim in quasi-apocalyptic terms: “We were wrong all
along, let’s mea culpa, mea maxima culpa”.... Just when the human and nonhuman
associations are finally coming to the center of our consciousness, are beginning to
be shaped in our political arenas, are triggering our most personal and deepest
emotions, this is when a new apartheid is declared: leave nonhumans alone and let
the humans retreat— (7)

After having devastated the planet, they began to complain they should not have
moved at all. Oops! Sorry... we won’t do it again (7).

FOOTNOTE:

In that model, there is a body, meaning a subject; there is a world, meaning objects;
and there is an intermediary, meaning a language, that establishes connections
between the world and the subject. If we use this model, we will find it very difficult
to render the learning by the body dynamic: the subject is ‘in there’ as a definite
essence, and learning is not essential to its becoming; the world is out there, and
affecting others is not essential to its essence (How to Talk About the Body 208).

Footnote: Readers in a hurry, crib sheet, another place where Latour’s

stylistic/methodological choices betrays his argument for ‘moving slowly’: As Sal
Restivo notes, “When he then tells us that he has provided a six-page “crib sheet” for
“readers in a hurry” (perhaps you don’t remember that he has already warned you
that we need to proceed like the tortoise to beat the hare, or that he has promised
you a meticulously organized argument), we are left to wonder why we shouldn’t
just read the crib sheet (Politics of Latour 112).
AGAINST REPENTENCE - The word “environmentalism” thus designates this turning
point of history when the unwanted consequences are suddenly considered as such
a monstrosity that the only logical step appears to be to abstain and to repent: “We
should not have committed so many crimes, now we should be good and limit
ourselves.” (9)

If I am right, the breakthrough consists in no longer seeing a contradiction between

the spirit of emancipation and their catastrophic outcomes, but to
The real crime of the Creator, Doctor Frankenstein, is not to have invented a
horrible monster. The true abomination, after he had given life to an unnamed being
through some combination of hubris and high technology, is to have abandoned the
Creature to itself. This real sin is revealed in the novel by the Creature when it meets
its maker (on a glacier in the Alps but we can forget that detail!). This is when the
Creature claims that it was not born a monster but that it became criminal after
being left alone by a horrified Dr Frankenstein who fled from his laboratory once he
had seen the horrible thing twitch to life. (11)

that the gigantic sins that were to be committed would be hiding a much greater sin
that it has been upon our generation to finally atone for: not technology itself, but
the absence of love for the technology we have created, as if we had decided that we
were unable to follow through with the education of our own children. (11)

THEOLOGY - The real question is to have the same type of patience and energy as
God the Creator Himself. And the comparison is not blasphemous if it is true that we
have been taking the whole of Creation on our shoulders and have now become
literally (and not metaphorically in our actions) coextensive to the Earth. This is
another gloss, this time techno- theological, of the Biblical assertion that we have
been created in His image (12).

The link between technology and theology (admittedly not very much studied by
scholars who are even more “atechnists” as they are atheists) hinges on the notion
of mastery. What does it mean to be a master? In the first great narrative, mastery
was supposed to be such total dominance by the master that he (a masculine here
again is required) was emancipated entirely from any care and worry. This is the
myth about mastery that was used to describe the technical, scientific and economic
dominion of Man over Nature. But if you think about it according to the second great
narrative, this myth is really odd: where have you ever seen a master freed from any
dependence on his dependents? When Descartes exclaimed that we should be
“maîtres et possesseurs de la nature” what is so shocking in this tired old sentence is
not the idea that we should be masters (even if this is what the environmentalists
believe) but the very idea of what it is to be master of anything or anyone (and this
is where the breakthrough should lead, it seems to me). If it is true that we always
take our idea of mastery and creation from God, well the Christian God at least is not
a master that masters anything (in the first modernist sense of the word) but who,
on the contrary, gets folded into, involved with, implicated with and incarnated into
His Creation; and who is so much attached and dependent on His Creation that he is
continually forced (convinced? willing?) to save it again and again. So once again the
sin is not to wish to have dominion over nature but to believe that this dominion
means emancipation and not attachment. The question is for the confused domain of
theology and ecology to decide which God we want to be for which sort of Creation,
knowing that, contrary to Dr Frankenstein, we cannot suddenly stop being involved
and “go home.” Incarnated we are, incarnated we will be. In spite of a centuries-old
misdirected metaphor, we should, without any blasphemy, reverse the Scripture
and exclaim: “What good is it for a man to gain his soul, yet forfeit the whole world?”
(12)

AGAINST EPISTIMOLOGY-

If by “epistemology” we name the discipline that tries to understand how we

manage to bridge the gap between representations and reality, the only conclusion
to be drawn about it is that this discipline has no subject matter whatsoever,
because we never bridge such a gap — not, mind you, because we don’t know
anything objectively, but because there is never such a gap. The gap is an artifact due
to the wrong positioning of the knowledge acquisition pathway. We imagine a
bridge over an abyss, when the whole activity consists of a drift through a chain of
experience where there are many successive event-like termini and many
substitutions of heterogeneous media. (Knowledge as a mode of existence p.15)

All its interesting questions concern what is known by science and how we can live
with those entities but certainly not whether it knows objectively or not — sorry for
those who have scratched their head about this last one for so long. Skepticism, in
other words, does not require much of an answer. (KME 15)

KNOWLEDGE AS A SUBWAY SYSTEM - (KME 17)

Whatever your metaphysics, you would agree that there must be a nuance between
being a horse and having a tiny fraction of the horse existence made visible in the
Natural History Museum. The least provocative version of this crossing point is to
say that horses benefitted from a mode of existence while they were alive, a mode
which aimed at reproducing and “enjoying” themselves — enjoyment is Alfred
North Whitehead’s expression— and that, at the intersection with paleontologists,
some of their bones, hundreds of thousands of years later, happened to enter into
another mode of existence once fragments of their former selves had been shunted,
so to speak, into paleontological pathways. Let’s call the first mode, subsistence and
the second, reference (and let’s not forget that there might be many more than two
modes). (KME 24)

THINKING BEYOND TIME AND SPACE (Following Whitehead) (p. 26)

How could such a contradictory metaphysics have the slightest bearing on our ways
of thinking? Because it has the great advantage of ensur- ing the continuity of space
and time by connecting all entities through concatenations of causes and
consequences. Thus, for this assembly no composition is necessary. In such a
conception, nature is always already assembled, since nothing happens but what
comes from before. It is enough to have the causes, the consequences will follow,
and they will possess nothing of their own except the carrying further of the same
indisputable set of characteristics. Let these automatic causal chains do their work
and they will build up the cage of nature. (Compositionalist Manifesto 482).

The time of time is over: Today, the avant-gardes have all but disappeared, the front
line is as impossible to draw as the precise boundaries of terrorist networks, and the
well-arrayed labels “archaic,” “reactionary,” and “progressive” seem to hover
haphazardly like a cloud of mosquitoes. If there is one thing that has vanished, it is
the idea of a flow of time moving inevitably and irreversibly forward that can be
predicted by clear-sighted thinkers. ( Compositonalist Manifesto 473)

Not as a war cry for an avant-garde to move even further and faster ahead, but
rather as a warning, a call to attention, so as to stop going further in the same way as
before toward the future. The nuance I want to outline is that between progress and
progressive. It is as if we had to move from an idea of inevitable progress to one of
tenta- tive and precautionary progression. (473)

On COMPOSITIONISM: It thus draws attention away from the irrelevant difference

between what is constructed and what is not constructed, toward the crucial
difference between what is well or badly constructed, well or badly composed.7
What is to be composed may, at any point, be decomposed. In other words,
compositionism takes up the task of searching for universality but without believing
that this universality is already there, waiting to be unveiled and discovered. (474)

no human, no atom, no virus, no organism has ever resided “in” nature understood
as res extensa. (477).

the old opposition between what is constructed and what is not constructed, instead
of the slight but crucial difference between what is well and what is badly
constructed (or composed) (478).

For a compositionist, nothing is beyond dispute. And yet, closure has to be achieved.
But it is achieved only by the slow process of composition and compromise, not by
the revelation of the world of beyond. (478)

While naturalists could previously limit themselves, for instance, to situating the red
tuna in the great chain of predators and prey, they now have to add to this
ecosystem Japanese consumers, activists, and even President Sarkozy, who had
promised to protect the fish before retreating once again when confronted with the
Mediterranean fishing fleet (480).

ON THE ACCUASTION OF ANTHROPOCENTRISM (and the fear of animism): It is this

conceit that lies at the root of all the critiques of environmentalists as being too
“anthropocentric” because they dare to “attribute” values, price, agency, purpose, to
what cannot have and should not have any intrinsic value (lions, whales, viruses,
CO2, monkeys, the ecosystem, or, worst of all, Gaia). The accusation of
anthropomorphism is so strong that it paralyzes all the efforts of many scientists in
many fields—but especially biology—to go beyond the narrow constraints of what
is believed to be “materialism” or “reductionism.” It immediately gives a sort of New
Age flavor to any such efforts, as if the default position were the idea of the
inanimate and the bizarre innovation were the animate. Add agency? You must be
either mad or definitely marginal (481).

For purely anthropocentric—that is, political—reasons, naturalists have built their

collective to make sure that subjects and objects, culture and nature remain utterly
distinct, with only the former having any sort of agency. An extraordinary feat:
making, for purely anthropocentric reasons, the accusation of being
anthropomorphic into a deadly weapon! (483)

Students of technology are wary of anthropomorphism that they see as a projection

of human characters to mere mechanisms, but mechanisms to another ‘‘morphism,’’
a non- figurative one that can also be applied to humans. The difference between
‘‘action’’ and ‘‘be- havior’’ is not a primary, natural one (Where are the missing
masses 165).

AGAINST ‘SO CALLED MATERIALISM:

As science studies and feminist theory have documented over and over again, the
notion of matter is too political, too anthropomorphic, too narrowly historical, too
ethnocentric, too gendered, to be able to define the stuff out of which the poor
human race, expelled from Modernism, has to build its abode (484).

’The disappearance of agency in the so-called “materialist world view” is a stunning

invention, especially since it is contradicted every step of the way by the odd
resistance of reality (482)

although every state of affairs deploys associations of media- tors, everything is

supposed to happen as if only chains of purely passive intermediaries were to
unfold. Paradoxically, the most stubborn realism, the most rational outlook is
predicated on the most unrealistic, the most contradictory notion of an action
without agency (482).
ON THE CONFUSION OF SPACE WITH PAPER

He goes on: let us be careful here: I am not saying that human intentional embodied
mind and spirit never really look at the material world according to the laws of
geometry. (The critique has been made often enough; the whole of phenomenology
has explored this avenue already). I am saying that even the material physical
objects making up the world do not stand in the world according to what would be
expected of them if they were thrown into res extensa. In other words, the “scientific
world view” is unfair to human intentionality, spiritual values, and ethical
dimensions does not bother me too much: I am much more concerned if it is even
more unfair to the peculiar ways electrons, rocks, amoebas, lice, rats, plants,
buildings, locomotives, computers, mobiles, and pills have a hold and a standing in
this world. Nothing, absolutely nothing, ever resided in res extensa—not even a
worm, a tick, or a speck of dust—but masses of beings have been exquisitely drawn
on white paper, engraved on copper, photographed on silver salt-coated plates,
modeled on the computer, etc.—including worms, ticks, and grains of dust (142)

Far from being what the world is made of—and thus out of which the res cogitans
should flee as far as possible—they are no more than a few of the many components
contained inside the world of spheres and networks. The global is a form of
circulation inside those sites, not what could contain them. The Latin etymology of
the res extensa contains, to be sure, an extensibility that borders on the infectious,
but this is no reason for sound minds to let it trespass beyond the narrow confines
of inscription practices— and even less to imagine that it is such a mimetic
description of the world that the whole real world of living organisms should
migrate out of the res extensa, now construed as “space,” as the only thing that
really stands. This absurdly extensive definition of the res extensa is probably the
most hidden but the most potent source of nihilism. Imagine that—the real world
confused with the white expanse of a piece of paper (Spheres and Networks 142)

AGAINST SPACE (OBJECTS MAKE THEIR SPACE)

There is probably no more decisive difference among thinkers than the position
they are inclined to take on space: Is space what inside which reside objects and
subjects? Or is space one of the many connections made by objects and subjects? In
the first tradition, if you empty the space of all entities there is something left: space.
In the second, since entities engender thei space (or rather their spaces) as they
trudge along, if you take the entities out, nothing is left, especially space. Tell me
what your position on space is, and I’ll tell you who you are: I suspect such a
touchstone is equally discrimi- nating for philosophers, architects, art historians and
others (Spheres and Networks 142).

AGAINST HUMAN EXCEPTIONALISM (Consciousness): What would be amusing, if it

had not been such a waste of time, is that “spiritualists” have exerted them- selves
for three centuries trying to save from the diluvium the little arch of the human soul
floating on the vast ocean of the ever-mounting res extensa, without realizing that
this ocean was but a trickle of highly local- ized techniques to allow on paper—and
later on screen— the manipulation of figures by conserving a certain number of
constants (Spheres and Networks 142)

'Who mixes up the fate of humans and non-humans? Those hundreds of thousands who bring
microbes to bear on our lives, atoms to heat our houses, electrons to carry our voices, fossilized
skulls which modify our genealogies, radio-waves which disseminate our President's speeches?
Or, we, the dozens of social scientists who try to reconstruct how the former render the
boundaries between human and non-human more meaningless every day? Who is building the
huge melting-pot where humans, animals, natural things and artifacts exchange properties? We
or those we try to follow? Who is extravagant? Those who breed hybrids? Or those who are trying
to rework all of social science, so that we might understand how hybrids can so easily be created
in spite of the 'strict boundary' between human and non-human ? What is the more barbarian? To
define a politics that considers all spokespersons equally - no matter if they represent a human or
non-human constituency - or to cling to version of politics that does not include the politics of
things? (Clothing the Naked Truth 125)

LATOUR IS IN FAVOR OF REDUCTIONISM, OF USEFUL SCIENTIFIC TRUTHS

(provided they are local and acknowledge their locality): But success at handling
entities by generating results and entire industries out of them is not the same thing
as building the cage of nature with its long chains of causes and consequences. It is
actually the opposite: what reductionism shows in practice is that only the
proliferation of ingenious detours, of highly localized sets of skills, is able to extract
interesting and useful results from a multitude of agencies (Compositionalist
Manifesto 483).
A sentence does not hold together because it is true, but be- cause it holds together we say that it is "true."
What does it hold on to? Many things. Why? Because it has tied its fate to anything at hand186 [rreductions
that is more solid than itself. As a result, no one can shake it loose without shaking everything else. • Nothing
more, you the religious; nothing less, you the relativists.(Pasteurization 185-186)

COMPOSITIONALISM
Compositionists, however, cannot rely on such a solution. The con- tinuity of all
agents in space and time is not given to them as it was to naturalists: they have to
compose it, slowly and progressively. And, moreover, to compose it from
discontinuous pieces. Not only because human destiny (microcosm) and nonhuman
destiny (macrocosm) are now entangled for everyone to see (contrary to the
strange dream of Bifurcation), but for a much deeper reason on which the capture of
the creativity of all agencies depends: consequences overwhelm their causes, and
this overflow has to be respected everywhere, in every domain, in every discipline,
and for every type of entity. It is no longer possible to build the cage of nature—and
indeed it has never been possible to live in this cage. (484)
the fact of the mat- ter is that matters of fact are in great risk of disappearing, like so
many other endangered species (485).

The increase of disputability—and the amazing extension of scientific and technical

controversies—while somewhat terrifying at first, is also the best path to finally
taking seriously the political task of establishing the continuity of all entities that
make up the common world.37 I hope to have made it clear why I stated earlier that
between nature and politics one has to choose (485)

The ecological crisis is nothing but the sudden turning around of someone who had
actually never before looked into the future, so busy was He extricating Himself
from a horrible past (486)

FROM FUTURE TO PROSPECTS

What makes the times we are living in so interesting (and why I still think it is useful
to make this manifest through a manifesto) is that we are progressively discovering
that, just at the time when people are despairing at realizing that they might, in the
end, have “no future,” we suddenly have many prospects. Yet they are so utterly
different from what we imagined while fleeing ahead looking back- wards that we
might cast them only as so many fragile illusions. Or find them even more terrifying
than what we were trying to escape from (486)

Of course what they see is not pretty—no prettier than what was un- folding in the
spiritual eyes of the Angelus Novus. To be sure, it is not a well-composed cosmos, a
beautiful and harmonious Pandora Planet, but, as I said, a rather horrendous
kakosmos. How could the Moderns have succeeded in assembling anything properly
while not looking at it! It would be like playing the piano while turning one’s back to
the keyboard. . . . It is impossible to compose without being firmly attentive to the
task at hand. But, horror of horrors, it does not have the same features as the archaic
past from which they fled in terror for so long. For one good reason: from this
horror you cannot flee! It is coming at you (487)

A NEW NOTION OF SPACE (Local, designed, One with no outside)

When we ponder how the global world could be made habitable—a question
especially important for architects and designers—we now mean habitable for
billions of humans and trillions of other creatures that no longer form a nature or, of
course, a society, but rather, to use my term, a possible collective (contrary to the
dual notions of nature-and-society, the collective is not collected yet, and no one has
the slightest idea of what it is to be composed of, how it is to be assembled, or even if
it should be assembled into one piece). But why has the world been made
uninhabitable in the first place? More precisely, why has it not been conceived as if
the question of its habitability was the only question worth asking? (Spheres and
Networks, 141).
There is no access to the global for the simple reason that you always move from
one place to the next through narrow corridors without ever being outside…Global
talks are at best tiny topics inside well-heated hotel rooms in Davos (141).

The choice is not between nature and society— two ways of being inhuman. The
real choice is between two utterly different distributions of spatial conditions: one
in which there is a vast outside and infinite space but where every organism is
cramped and unable to deploy its life forms; the other in which there are only
tiny insides, networks and spheres, but where the artificial conditions for the
deployment of life forms are
fully provided and paid for (143)

the notion of “environment” began to occupy public consciousness precisely when it

was realized that no human action could count on an outside environ- ment any
more: There is no reserve outside which the unwanted consequences of our
collective actions could be allowed to linger and disappear from view. Literally there
is no outside, no décharge where we could dis- charge the refuse of our activity.
What I said earlier, rather philosophically, that the problem was “lack of space,” now
takes a much more radical, practical, literal, and urgent meaning: No outside is left
(144).

just at the moment when what is needed is a theory of the artificial construction,
maintenance, and development of carefully designed space, we are being drawn
back to another utopia—a reactionary one this time—of a myth- ical past in which
nature and society lived happily together (“in equilibrium,” as they say, in “small
face- to-face communities” without any need for artificial design) (144)

CONSTRUCTIONISM BUT NOT SOCIAL CONSTRUCTIONISM

For me constructivism was, well, constructive, not destructive. How wrong I was! I
soon realized this when I entered into tense discussions with epistemologists over
what was for me a complete red herring, namely the realist versus relativist
controver- sies. (It is true that the unfortunate addition of the word ‘social’, as in
‘social construc- tion’, introduced a bias that has taken me 20 years to redress
(Coming out as a Philosopher 602).

AGAINST ECONOMICS (AS SECOND NATURE)

Once ‘out of nature’ (the first nature), the moderns are still thrown into this second
nature defined by ‘the iron laws of economy’, which no longer is their rightful home
than the first, and where all the defects of their strange contradictory construction
are made even more damning. If it is true, as I have argued all along, that modernity
can be recalled, meaning that we should finally remember what it is really made of,
but also that we are responsible for rectifying the defects of the product that we
have sold all too well to the rest of the world (the same way an automaker ‘recalls’ a
flawed car), the project of modernity will not be achieved as long as we have not
been able to recall economics (Callon, 1998): a task, strangely enough, more arduous
than freeing scientific practice from the ideology of Science, with a capital S, or
helping religion and also politics to sing again in their right respective keys. (Coming
out as a Philosopher, 606)

RESPONSE (TO NON-HUMANS) AS RESPONSIBILITY

For a definition of what we mean by response, the reader will need to consider the
etymology of respondeo: I become responsible by responding, in word or deed, to
the call of someone or something.3 If this game rule is accepted, the reader will
think it normal to focus on extension and reduction in the class of beings for which
one feels (according to one’s capacity to understand their call) more or less respon-
sible. One may become sensitive or increasingly insensitive to the call of certain
beings, whether human or nonhuman: that is indeed an everyday experience
(Morality or Moralism, 312).

it is impossible to reopen the moral ques- tions explored here without modifying
our theory of science. So long as objects are taken for what the epistemological
tradition has made of them, it will always seem ridiculous to lengthen the list of
beings to whose call we should respond scrupulously; doing so will only be seen, in
the context of modern epistemology, as contemptible anthropomorphism (Morality
or Moralism 325)

What we should find amazing are the strange operations whereby we have
constantly restricted the list of beings to whose appeal we should have been able to
respond. From this point of view, there is nothing less “natural” than philosophical
modernism.31 The whole inter- est of Kant’s text is that it displays the
extraordinary difficulty that philosophers must have faced, a bit more than two
centuries ago, when immunizing themselves against the evidence—contrary to their
own arguments—of a proliferation of moral subjects calling out for scrupulous
treatment (325).

EMBODIMENT

to have a body is to learn to be affected, meaning ‘effectuated’, moved, put into

motion by other entities, humans or non-humans. If you are not engaged in this
learning you become insensitive, dumb, you drop dead (How to talk about the body
205)

Equipped with such a ‘patho-logical’ definition of the body, one is not obliged to
define an essence, a substance (what the body is by nature), but rather… an
interface that becomes more and more describable as it learns to be affected by
more and more elements. The body is thus not a provisional residence of something
superior – an immortal soul, the universal or thought – but what leaves a dynamic
trajectory by which we learn to register and become sensitive to what the world is
made of. Such is the great virtue of this definition: there is no sense in defining the
body directly, but only in rendering the body sensitive to what these other elements
are. By focusing on the body, one is immediately – or rather, mediately – directed to
what the body has become aware of (How to Talk About the Body 206).

SLOWING DOWN

Far from “getting beyond” the dichotomies of man and nature, sub- ject and object,
modes of production, and the environment, in order to find remedies for the crisis
as quickly as possible, what political ecolo- gists should have done was slow down
the movement, take their time, then burrow down beneath the dichotomies like the
proverbial old mole (PN 3).

“the tortoise, or at least so I hope, will end up passing the hare” (PN 3)
If I could plead any authority at all, I am well aware that I would save my readers
time: they could trust me. But the point is not to save time, to speed up, to
synthesize masses of data, to solve urgent problems in a hurry, to ward off dramatic
cata- clysms by equally dramatic actions (PN 6).