Transcript for:
Insights from Bruno Latour's Lecture

good evening and welcome to tonight's lecture by professor bruno latour my name is ian kleinheirenbrink and i will introduce professor latour before his lecture as well as interview him afterwards professor latur is one of the most celebrated thinkers in the humanities and social sciences he has authored numerous books and in numerous articles plus various other media such as art exhibitions and theater productions for over four decades now his ongoing work has been at the heart of academic and public debates about science politics technology and the interconnections between the three some of some of his first books such as laboratory life and we have never been modern are now considered classics in several academic fields originally famous for his studies in science technology and politics his subsequent work increasingly engages with humanity's ecological challenges as you can read in okinawa and varkun in london to use the dutch titles of his latest books the occasion for tonight's lecture is that tomorrow professor latur receives the spinoza lens a bi-annual award for leading thinkers who have made their mark researching society's ethical principles to paraphrase from the jury report he receives the prize for being one of the first philosophers to have shown that technologies are not just passive tools but active parts of the very fabric of our society secondly professor latour has argued since the 90s that our ecological problems ought to make us rethink our very notions of politics and democracy among other things he recommends that we add the political representation of entities such as oceans and rainforests to the already existing representation of countries identities and ideologies in our parliaments this being said i have just two more small remarks before we turn to professor lature's lecture first tonight's program is a collaboration between rabbat reflects the stichting international espinoza price and the ambassador of the north say and i would like to thank all those involved for organizing this evening and making this second as said there will be a short interview with professor latour after his lecture if you want to propose a question for that interview from home you can do so by following the instructions that should now appear at the bottom of your screen and that being said i now happily give the floor to professor latour thank you very much iron i'm greatly honored to be in this country that in french we call nimeige i know it has no connection with the way you in dutch called the city in which you are located or being located somewhere today is the most difficult thing to decide i'm in paris and i'm opening the discussion that you kindly uh organized and i will use the great empirical example provided to me by the embassy for the north sea for those who are not yet aware of it we use three different topic one of them is the work very famous in holland on the delta which i visited actually 40 years ago with my friend weber biker and actually the the father of viva biker the other one is noise underwater and the third one is an eel fish which i'm afraid i never actually eat but which seems to be very important in the local cultures i would use that uh because i like to combine the very philosophical question of a parliament of things with empirical cases and i will use the one provided to me i have to say that i was slightly amused by the argument of a north sea embassy with this statement that the north sea owns itself because of course uh coming from holland this was funny if you think that uh four centuries ago gracious invented the legal conscription and the legal fiction that the sea belongs to no one and the freedom of the sea was the great way of dutch fire structures started so i was extremely interested amused but interested because it's a great food for thought but the same dutch invention went from the freedom of sea to the very interesting notion that the north sea owns itself i would come back to that in the third part of my lectures i will first backtrack a little bit to explain what i meant because many people might not know what this strange mystery of parliament of things mean and then of course inevitably in the second part i will begin to discuss why i changed slightly my conception of it i mean moving from a sort of social democratic version of it to a more tragic one and uh at the third the third part before concluding i will uh try to go a bit deeper in this uh tragedy which was not really anticipated at first so first let me backtrack a little and try to explain why i went through this notion of parliament of things if you remember for those who know my work it was at the very end of a book we have never been modern but it was not as some people have argued to give a voice to non-human or rather it was a way to give a voice to scientists because in my view scientists had a voice of course and there is no other way for the non-human to talk in a sort of coherent and factual way except for the scientist activity and the scientist's mouth so to speak but this voice was not clearly understood and was attributed very strange quality of certainty as if a voice from nowhere which i found disputable so in the way i introduce a parliament of things in we have never been modern is to say wait i mean we have congressmen and deputies and all sorts of politicians who speak for humans but who are the ones who speak for monuments they are already there and their voice is very important and entangled in the political question that we have to deal with what are the time i call hybrid word i don't use anymore and these people deserve to be heard simultaneously as people who can be trusted but also as people who can like all representative of some other entity be if not doubted at least put into question so the idea was to use the notion of an extended parliamentary situation to make sense of the innumerable disputes we were studying in the field of science and technology studies which at the time i have to remind you was extremely important in holland and which allowed us to work a lot with all sorts the colleagues here in amsterdam in 20 in maastricht et cetera and of course now with the kovite 19 we know what it means to have non-human speaking because we have endless numbers of physicians doctors epidemiologists citizens activists anti-vaccine people who all speak in the name of those entities so we sort of know it doesn't mean that we speak all of them in the right tone but we sort of know that the so-called parliament of things is actually there as a competition of voices in a public debate so the first notion was a way to say we don't want to have a system especially because of all those disputes about science and technology where we would have representative of the humans those we elect and uh who are supposed to be uncertain about what they say and we are supposed to have a whole regime of representation to doubt or put into question what they say and on the other one a voice from nowhere which has no ground no as we as we say in our jargon no enunciation scheme no way to test where is the voice coming from and whom they address who would be the voice of science so it was really a way again not to give voice to the non-human but finally to hear the practical voice of a scientist speaking in the name of non-human with as we know with a double situation which is so interesting to study and many of us have studied it for the last 40 years but when they are right is the fact themselves that speak but a lot of work is needed to have a fact themselves speak so it's a very this very highly complex voice system in science which uh i try to to put a sort of power with a very complex system but much more studied by political scientists which allows humans to speak in the name of other new man and i always said that it's actually as difficult to be a god a good politician as it is to be a good scientist because the confusion and the possibility of corruption of both voice mechanism is of course immense as we see now with the fake news and actually the whole idea at the time was to avoid a sort of excess of objectivity which would have it should have didn't work but it should have stopped so to speak the the fake news to develop and that was not what happened for reason i would say in my second part of my lectures the other thing in this first argument going back to the origin of my parliament of things is the word things it was strange to use the word things but in old nordic countries as you know ding is considered as an assembly in latin is res and heidegger made a lot of work on this etymology of the work and thing as assembly it's actually all german cultures about ding which i developed in a big exhibition in 2005 making things public and again it was not to give voice to non-human so much as to give a place a location for conflicts issues disputes and wars the whole idea of the thing actually even in old icelandic as well as in english or in the latin and greek country cause is this is where you are assembled because you disagree so it's actually the magnetic element of a conflict what i call later matters of concern which actually build the collective so it was a very powerful way in the mit catalog making things public but also in many work and politics of nature to describe the collective as made of those matters of concern which attract around themselves disputed parties so it was to get out of the idea that politics can be described without the matters of concern which actually explain why people assemble we assemble because we disagree and this is why we are excited so to speak by the situation it's an old etymology and uh we work at it quite a lot with dutch philosophers and i'm very happy to mention here and north geomarez both of them i learned enormously for making doing making things public and have worked with me for all of the all of those years so this is important to say to finish this first part because it was not really an abstract question should non-human be represented should they be given a voice or should we actually have them we should we really give them rights but it was a practical way to allocate disputes and to hear all the voices which are simultaneously uh fighting for being heard in the public space this is why the notion of cartography of controversy was so important for me so even though as many of the people who are interested legally this time by the notion of parliament of things uh know very well even though i've been very influenced by the famous book by stone from 1972 it's a very old book through trees are standing it was not an argument about granting rights to trees or granting rights to sea but it was the realization that already non-humans have an endless numbers of canal to have their voices heard but those uh canal those network all of those series of ways of being heard has no institutional basis so we know that non-humans are represented by scientists militant artists citizens politicians and that in fact politicians don't talk about humans only they talk constantly about other things precisely about things about matters of concern so the situation is not to grant rights it's to build the institutional order which would actually make those uh many different voices visible and of course allocate them and this was the whole idea of politics of nature do we have a constitution for that the problem and this is now the beginning of a second part of my talk what does it mean today 30 years later because politics of nature as i just said is simultaneously obvious i mean everybody now understand but if you talk about food if you talk about constructions if you talk about microbes if you talk about wind if you talk about car batteries if you talk about any matters of concern we need some sort of institutional frame and legally there are endless numbers of scheme to do that actually the dutch are very advanced on several of the issues and suits which have been pursued by young people to contest in court in the name of a climate the question of uh climate change as you know and interestingly the lord in london have stopped the third uh development of uh efro in the name of a paris agreement even though it has no strong legal status because it's signed but it's not binding it was never used by the lord to uh object and reject the efu extension so it does have a lot of uh inventions there are a lot of invention around rights about so now it's it's sort of cause settle so to speak but on the other hand i was much too optimistic in the 1990s i was imagining a sort of a framework of republic a democracy basically just extended but it looked plausible at the time and i used in politics of nature a tone and a style reminiscing reminiscent of uh rousseau and the social contract i mean except the style of course no one can imitate also style but the tone of the argument the idea of a constitution to make sense of this many voices still was supposed was based on the idea that you could actually have a common world where people would disagree of course and i explained in many ways how people would come to an agreement about it with this constitutional order it was very clever and i think it's still useful except political politics of nature implied that there was a possibility of a general agreement on the procedures that is it was a supposition which we now understand was overly optimistic that you could have a people on the soil agreeing on disagreeing basically as the saying goes that's not the case i mean we could imagine a social democratic order extended to non-humans which was the case and it was necessary at the time but it was supposing something which actually didn't stand the privileged reasonable human giving or granting rights and opening the collective borders to non-humans would then represent it with the slightly condescending register which was used at the time and still is used at the time of granting rights to lake to sea to rivers or to the earth as if we were in a position we were humans to grant rights to things which have no rights the model being as if when slavery was abolished it was a great act of justice to grant rights to the slaves but it was to forget that we didn't grant rights to the slave a slave took what was right and with the fierce extremely violent courageous and uh difficult action so the idea of granting rights to non-humans even though it looks reasonable in the 1990s or 1980s because the climate crisis was not so strong and the non-human if i can say that didn't fight back so explicitly doesn't look reasonable so reasonable now because we have to deal with what was completely unexpected except of course for some of the very advanced scientists namely that non-human will fight back and require request an entry and a position into our constitutive order which was very far from the condescending and generous gesture of humans giving rights to nature so to speak as a saying goes this is why i use the notion later of a new climatic regime using the word regime with all its connotation political connotation so the problem that today we are not in a social democratic attitude where the question would be are you generous enough to extend rights to this or that elements of nature we are in a tragedy so we moved we moved basically from uh it's as if rosso had moved if you want from uh writing the social contract to finding what himself in the time of a terror so to speak it with robespierre i mean it's a shift of that level and the social contract of course was very important during the french revolution but it was not very up to the discussions when tragedy and terror began to be extend the tragedy i've tried to recently to find a fiction as i usually do a fundamental thing is a fiction i try to find another fiction which is that we live in different planets and i've just opened on friday an exhibition in taipei in in in taiwan i mean open is a way to say because i wasn't there of course where the title of the exhibition iran kindly mentioned that i was also curators of exhibition and like curation very much the title of a uh exhibition is you and i don't live on the same planet so it this is a level of descent where the argument we agree to dissent doesn't work we agree to disagree doesn't work when to use an example which everyone would know of mr trump meeting greta sandberg in the united nations last year maybe now two years ago and i don't know if you remember but trump went through office to deliver one of his absurd talk and greta sandberg was there and looked at the man with a prophetic eyes dooming trump dooming but that's your prime but if you now live in different planets it makes the constitutional order much more difficult to sustain and to imagine this is why as you alluded to in your introduction kindly i wrote where to land or down to earth in in english that is disputes which are beyond the bounds of a democratic ideal which has been developed in the past and again the question has changed now in a way which i did not anticipate it's no longer how would you welcome non-humans into collective collectivist work i was using to remember to replace the word society society in the tradition is made of human inner environment collective is a mixed bag of all sorts of things no longer how to welcome non-humans into collectives but another question we have to discuss with people who say we don't agree that non-humans have a bearing on collective life so the opposition shifted if you want before it was okay we have all sorts of matters of concern we have a sort of democratic order can we expand this democratic order to include the new issues which in fact were not so new of a condition of existence the material reality with which the social order is being based and now it's a different dispute people don't live in the same place they don't actually live on the same planet and the discussion is now they are people for which the question of non-human is central for their definition of humanity of their own humanity so to speak but they have to fight with people who don't agree that this is a question in other words the climatic regime the new climatic regime distinguish now if i want to dramatize it maybe too much but to make the thing clearer human on planet on planet earth and it's a planet and in the time or at a time which we would call modern so that's one definition of a situation and with the politics associated with it and then there is another camp which divide all of us and every nations on earth where you have what i call terrestrial beings and terrorist field is quite different from human wha in a time which we now call anthropocene but it's not only a question of time it's also also a question of space who live in what my scientist friend called critical zone and actually i've also opened a few months ago another exhibition in karlsruhe in zkm which is called critical zone to try to explore the extraordinary contrast between the notion of planet a human living on planet and terrestrial living on the critical zone in anthropocene time because it's a very different type of fight before the fight in the 1990s was we have a strong society we have a strong international order we could probably absorb the novelty of climate the novelty of the limits of the earth and it's just a question of expanding the democratic order and actually as many historians of the environment have shown it could have been done in the 1990s 1980s approximately the time according to oresquez and many other people where we could have acted at a very little cost we did not why did we not act well precisely this is where we shift from social democracy to tragedy because some people said no the question of the non-humans and the question of living inside the earth now defined as critical zone with audits activity and including of course the climate transformation what i call the climate mutation is not and will not be taken care of very interested of course and very incensed like many people by the coherence of the trump administration for the last four years i mean it's a sort of chaos but on one topic they have been amazingly coherent that's in the denial that the situation is actually linked to the climate transformation of a climate mutation so it's a level of of a tragic descent sorry a level of descent which has a tragic dimension which i did not anticipate in the 1990s i mean it's quite extraordinary if you think of it that even in the united states we are no longer able to hold an election in a normal way i mean it shows that the extent of dispute and hatred is of course extraordinarily strong and it's very strange now i have to recognize i mean this is a sort of not an apology but a reflection on what i did before it would be actually strange now to talk about the expansion of parliamentary processes when even the united states the sort of beacon of democracy cannot hold an election in a normal way so the parliamentary model in other words is being put to an incredible stress and of course the reason i'm most happy to get this spinoza lens price is because as you all know it was one of the tragedy of spinoza's own life the peace the man of peace by excellence was submitted to this amazing tragedy of civil war and wrote for this reason the tractatus theological politicals and as i said in irreduction many years ago we are have to write doctor attract tattoos for the same reason that is the level of descent requires an invention in terms of political philosophy that we could not fathom before i mean maybe more astute people could have but i did not so that leads me to the third part which is of course much more speculative and in the spirit of spinoza's uh tattoos war and tragedy is what we are in so the idea of a constitutional order based on the parallel with the parliamentary process seems a bit odd but maybe it's because we have to modify the question which is not necessarily should we give standing to non-humans in a sort of generous gestures of granting emancipation but following what i mentioned in the second part of his introduction to the discussion which is that it's not the case that non-humans are waiting for us to give them rights they impinge on us they make us alive so no more that you can grant a great morality to those who fought against slavery even though of course they were right ignoring the fact that slaves themselves fought against and required requested torn apart the whole fabric of society to get those right this is the same situation with the non-humans they are not there waiting for us to give us right but they forced us to bow to something which looked like another power so in other words the situation is now completely reverse and this is why i was so interested by the intriguing quote in the north sea embassy to which i return the north sea which owns itself this is what is at the first line of a north sea embassy pledge so to speak i don't know if you pledge this word but if you say the north sea owns itself what does it mean it means that fishermen owners of tankers dam builders tourists whoever go through the north sea are owned by the north sea or ed's words means nothing the north sea owns itself which means that those who are actually asking for rights to go through the north sea are submitted to an authority which is superior to them you know what the situation is no longer the one should we buy our generous act of expansion of consciousness grant rights to monkeys apes forests lakes etc but can we submit ourselves ask for right request permission from those who own the land which of course is a slightly different uh project altogether it's no longer the sort of attitude for 1972 book by stone should trees are standing even though of course legally it makes a lot of sense to try to work out how can bashar mama a river in new zealand the north sea etc have legal rights which makes perfect sense but still the philosophical question is fairly different it is not human in their own capacity and complete strength so to speak allowed to grant that is human in a different sense and a different position asking for rights from the legitimate owners if i follow the north sea embassy proposition and since it's at the embassy we can have an ambassador's discussion later i hope in the discussion that follow of course because if it's a diplomatic proposition i make another diplomatic proposition if you say that the north sea owns itself then it means humans are owned by those powers and in a certain way i have to bow to this authority it's a topic which you might not want to discuss but which interests me of course a lot it means that this ownership by an entity like the north sea look a lot like what used to be called divinities so it's a sort of uh it has no not divinity in the religious sense but simply in the way that you have to ask permission to do things from something which is no longer not yet or not completely human which is a very old and traditional definition of divinities i've explored this question in a specific case which is the case of gaia now whatever is considered here we need and this is an important way to thank the north sea embassy for the invention during this year and i see that they are the co-sponsors of its lectures so it's fitting to develop that point a little bit more but we need to go through fiction in order to understand this philosophical situation in 2005 in paris with friends from my school in transport we did actually organize a parliament of things for good and we organized it was called make it work with a film about it a cop like the one which have been going for so many years on the climate but with a little twist and a little twist was that instead of having a nation-state like the united nations model discussing about their interests we added to them some of the entities which were matters of concern for several of them so i don't think amazon was represented in addition to some of the countries which claim a bit of amazon the arctic was represented and also the sea not the north sea i'm afraid but the sea which was a bit too large i agree and uh also the lobbies because we thought the lobbies deserve to be represented as such and every single entity had five representative of course human representative nice kids and students from sean's pool and all over the place and for one week before trying to represent the cop a few months before the real cop succeeded in paris i've written about it in the last chapter of facing gaia but what is interesting for me was that the encounter and of course it was a fiction because we are not mandated by anyone to do this even though it was organized by a colleague of mine who was the ambassadors for the french real climate uh conference so it was a fiction it was in a theater but the result was extremely interesting because you saw that the very fact of having an owner there arctic amazon ocean instead of just nation state modified the path of the diplomatic discussions with the nation-states and this is a very important result for me because it means that these are things which cannot be obtained only by philosophical work even though it is necessary not only by legal work although of course it's completely necessary but it has to be done in part by fiction to sort of scale model and anticipate the way in which things will change to the definition of human state nation state invented at a time if you say wait the north sea owns a part of what the matters of concern you try to organize as a human polity and the shift in the discussion was for me extremely uh revealing i'd made the argument in my head but to see for a week 200 kids and about 50 different institutions trying to negotiate what it means to be influenced by other entities which are not representing human even though it's a fiction was extremely uh important it's visible and again you learned a lot from the work done by the north sea embassy because precisely you modify the definition of humans and this is where i will conclude my uh introduction to this discussion which is that this is completely speculative but that's a good occasion to do it maybe we should abandon the slightly ill-constructed terms non-humans which have spread everywhere because of my work and i'm slightly worried about its extension because it's becoming sort of an equivalent or a synonym of object and it was of course not it was a whole different association as i showed in politics of nature so this is a tricky way to close these lectures but remember it's now a fight no it's a war no it's a dispute well it's a tragedy which imply some humans who deny that they are allowed to exist and made to exist by other entities and we don't need to call now these other entity non-humans because they are the owners of humans and there are people who say yes those are called terrestrial and remember terrestrial doesn't specify the species it doesn't specify the gender terrestrial are those who are made those who allowed any other one to live so to speak they are the one who made your life habitable and if we follow the north sea embassy argument they are in a way our owners so it's a it's a question now not of granting rights to non-women it's a question of definition of humanism do we talk about human who deny their dependency if you want these obviously terrestrial or do you consider that the terrestrial is actually bowing we have to understand what this bowing mean submitted let's say to an authority which is no longer there which is of course a very complicated question which is what is a polity that is actually not the sovereign definition of emancipated human making their own laws but the polity made of people who actually submit and ask permission and rights to the owners which is a very strange situation can you imagine the north sea where everybody will now every time they fish or every time they tour every time they send a boat to the north sea ask for some permission even though there are lots of tradition in the past and in other cultures where this is completely obvious it looks very strange to us especially to the dutch who have invented in the time of gracious exactly the opposite that is the right to spread for the whole world and freedom of sea without being uh embarrassed or encumbered by the ownership in this case of the english of a french so we have been full circle now here it's no question of granting rights it's a question of redefine humanism so this was just a way to start the discussion to thank uh aaron and the north sea embassy for holding this meeting to reflect i think it was necessary on the reason why i invented this strange notion of parliament of things why i think it's still important that has to be slightly modified or slightly situated re-situated if you want because of the tragedy of living in a different planet and this extent of descent i have to say is a source of great anxiety to me because i don't see how you can reuse the parliamentary regime of the the sort of way to think which was especially in holland built around the notion we agree to disagree if you don't live on the same planet at all if there are people who say no no no but non-humans are no importance for the definition of human with others who say i am a human because i defer i submit i bow to the non-human who made my existence possible it makes life extremely difficult thank you thank you very much for your lecture professor latour um i have many questions so if it's all right with you i'll immediately start with the first one um and that's more of a question for clarification because if i think about tragedies in a tragedy it's always already too late to act things are already set so then what is the what is the point um or in what sense are you then not a complete pessimist about our future no it's just that it is actually too late to act we are we are in a situation this is of course the whole climatic climatic regime we the the the players are the dice have been cast already we should have asked in we should have acted in the 1980s as i said i mean we still lots of things to do but we are not in the situation where we were before in the 1980s when i was writing politics of nature where we were still seeing the prime arrive and imagining ways to solve them just by expanding the social or the constitutive order to know any man because precisely the the key difference with the situation the climatic situation is that we have to pay so to speak the non-action which was deliberately not acting as many historians of environment have shown i mean it was deliberate in the 1980s not to act and that's what makes the situation a tragedy because what we will repair what we will manage to do and we will of course manage to do many things i'm not pessimistic at all will not be able to go back to the situation where we could have acted before so it is a tragedy in that very literal sense yes and then to to follow up on that um many uh many other thinkers who also reckon also work with the same issues who also recognize that we're past certain points where we could have acted more effectively um would say that you know looming ecological disasters necessitate or legitimate that we now grab our torches and pitchforks and we go after i don't know capitalism major corporations transnational organizations and so on all those responsible for these delays and so on but that does not seem to be the tone of your work because in your work it's there's a great respect for diplomacy there's a great respect for certain kinds of political ongoing political representation when's this difference and this non-violence in your own work non-violence would be maybe too extreme the whole argument about the revolutionary drive so to speak which is a very 19th century definition of history was based on the notion of um of progress so to speak it was based on the idea that if you move enough energy at a certain moment and at a certain point and exert a big shift you will move to another situation which is what in french we say conversely system so there is a big system and only if we act coherently for a little while we would of course go to another situation this is actually completely different now because the system has already been the revolution has already been there the system has already this is we this is why it's linked to the question about being late we have already had the transformation the mutation and we have to repair it so it's not a revolutionary situation it's a repair which is what anna singh and donahaue and many other people have very clarified a lot so the whole revolutionary attitude was very well adjusted to the 20th century uh argument of a system shift it's very badly uh connected but very badly uh adjusted to a situation where on the contrary we have to repair a situation which has been made tragic and the other thing which explain why it's so difficult to use the sort of old revolutionary ethos right or left actually because we are two of them is that we are divided among ourselves so it's very difficult actually to organize camp where you would align all of the bad things you don't want to do and all the good things you want to do and make a clear distinction clear distinction never work but still we had this idea before that you could make sense of a modernizing front and that the archaic front and reactionary one but if you take any issues including actually i realize you have a a glass of water and a i'm sorry to say a plastic uh bottle and your thing it's not mine but they gave it to me well that's even worse that's even worse you didn't complain see you are yourself divided and you accept the situation of domination from the plastic industry so this is where we are we we cannot order easily these fight and makes a clear line which was a great idea of a revolutionary attitude so this being said the situation is a war situation so but it's a strange war that on that note and you again you mentioned it again in your answer this idea of us not living on the same planets us not recognizing that we live on the same planets there's there's a there's an image that i like very much in in the book that you of course know by michel seal where there's this image i think of goya and it's two men who are fighting and while they're fighting they fail to notice that they are in quicksand and the idea there is that in these struggles they would have to recognize that they have something in common on which they vitally depend and if they don't incorporate that everybody sinks into the swamp and i think that a lot of us would like to think about ecological problems in the exact same way if we all recognize what is going on with rainforests or ice caps or sea levels then that would be a condition for the possibility of acting on something but that seems to be impossible if we live on different planets so is there anything that comes to take the place of that right about a nice that's a nice way to phrase the shift between a sort of social democrat version to a tragic version because say i love a natural contract it was written a few years before my politics of nature was in a way optimist much too optimistic because the metaphor itself that is these two guys fighting the argument is that since they see themselves go down and in the goya's argument we just die both die was supposed to have the effect of making the others at least the onlooker the one who look at the painting of the engraving i forgot um realize and then they come to the center but again exactly the opposite happened since sarah published this book and since i published my book the the there is this extraordinary uh set of cases in america because america is always the example of an extreme where uh the the governor of florida is actually forbidding everyone to talk about climate change while the mayor of miami has to move the curb and the street slightly up in order to avoid flooding so no the the possibility of seeing a collective disorder disorder and making people come to the senses has not been realized and i think it's actually in terms of social psychology there's lots of people trying to do that to understand that it's exactly the opposite but it's more the consequence of being visible the less easy it is to take care of them because people say and this is what i call the escapist of the exit planet uh we will survive and you go to hell which is basically the position of a trump administration so the more you actually see the consequences the less there is agreement about the collective order jose was as optimistic as too much optimistic as i was and if we then start talking in terms of what you mentioned as asking permission from entities like the north sea isn't that something that only would only convince or appeal to people who are already on board with seeing themselves and others as terrestrials the question then being what do we do with what do we do with everybody else who doesn't agree well i'm not sure i agree myself with it i mean you should have the ground better i mean it's a quite it's a quite strong statement uh although there are lots of legal philosophers who are working on this question of being owned by what you own but it's also something which again like the parliament of things is is fairly obvious that you depend on all this entity which allow you to live after all what else was the experiment of a kovid 19 if not a sudden realization that you depend strangely enough on the fact that chinese don't eat pangolin which was a strange element but also that you depend on microbes which i think i knew for many years but so it's not that far-fetched what is interesting in the argument of ownership is that it gives a name to the reversal of situation which is not should i grant rights to the sea but when i fish in the sea do i ask permission do i ask permission after all every single cultures would say yes of course you have to ask permission i mean it's a completely common sense in anthropology it's just very strange maybe this is you should take responsibility for your groceries argument you that uh suddenly this idea that no no you see we don't ask permission we move through it freely and it's us it's for us to decide so i agree it's not going to convince the other one the one who lives on planet um exit those i think are beyond conviction the one i'm really interested in trying to convince other one i call planet identity or security that is those the second part of trump success if you want to make this combination between escapists on one hand and identity people because those are actually the one the many of course who are left behind by the transformation i mean some other people say what happened what happened to the earth like we'll go to mars or we'll go somewhere else and we are rich enough anyway we are so rich that it makes no difference whatsoever to what happened but now there is a shift because the people who hear that even though they agree right now with the trumpist with the bolsonaro and the others they know they are left behind they will not go to mars i mean you cannot how many people are supposed to go to mars i mean if you have six or seven it would be bad what about the millions the billions so those are the one who have to be convinced and it it it's a very important aspect because populism is the great trend of a day even for the world populism is not so good so it's very important to invent ways of talking about land and dependency and soil and country and people which resonate at least with this planet this second planet the planet identity i know it's dangerous because it looked like something which would have been in the past considered reactionary but we we i think we have to be attentive to that to be owned by other entities is another way for humanism and democracy to develop but it has to be carefully carefully followed very carefully and in following that such a trajectory carefully how does one um avoid what you what you in your and what you write clearly do not want which is a return to talk of the high muds and the ground and the soil where you come from in the bad old very bad old let's say german sense well we have to be careful but haimat has many other meaning and and things that have meaning as well we have to be careful and yet uh you cannot just say we should not talk about these things because they are reactionary because in a way uh i mean historians of environment have shown that with great detail it is a responsibility of a progressive and left to have left all of his words of soil and land and sea and animals etc to the reactionary but history is not finished i mean it's a great moment in in polany's uh great book on the great transformation where it shows how uh the left left entirely to the uh juncker class i mean the german junkers and in in and the gentry in england the complete privilege of talking about land and security so it's not a definitive situation it's an historical um mistake so to speak on part of the left and it's the extr especially the extreme left of the of a lack of link with the conditions of the earth which let all of his words being taken by uh completely reactionary um people and reactionary movement but when you start to talk about the north sea owning itself i mean you have to be interested in what that mean what does that mean and it's not identity it's not inter i don't think the embassy of the north sea has anything to do with an identity of the north sea people who would defend against others not at all it's a recognition of dependency so it's exactly the opposite of identity i often say that when talking about the brexit if you had asked the brexit the english to talk about their dependency they would have realized they were european but if you ask them what is your identity they say ah we are just whatever british or whatever fancy they have so it's a question of interrogating in the right mode and all these words which are associated i agree with you with dangerous connotation shift when they are in terms of dependency and not in terms of identity and i think that's a very important uh question for the next uh years actually so then the the political question par excellence becomes what do you need instead of who are you or who do you want to be right okay because because dependency doesn't have borders by definition because you need you need to what you depend on is not inside your borders i mean it's true of your own body and that's a great thing with this idea of a hollow bone by in biology but it's the same thing with nation state or it's the same thing with economy i mean precisely the notion of dependency exactly goes exactly in the other direction that identity and this is why we can we we use with great care it's great these words of soil and people which are of course i know there's a whole 20th century history but before the 29th 20 20th century and 19th century history they had thousands of years of history so we should not uh preclude changes in the way we understand um after these these questions on let's say ecology i wanted to address a related but different topic and it's a question that i think you've already have gotten hundreds of times in the past decades but since some of those watching will be introduced to you for the first time tonight i'm going to ask it anyway and it's a question about facts um a 2015 working paper by our dutch scientific council for government policy recommended that our government considers a morality in view of the world in light of the challenges of the anthropocene and the first thing that this government report writes about you is that you do not consider scientists to discover facts but rather to make facts and almost every newspaper article and review about your work that has appeared in dutch media states the exact same thing and the spinoza lens jury report also writes states that you hold facts to be filled in intracleared in dutch by the backgrounds and interests of researchers so given that in dutch media at least your name is seems irrevocably tied to this idea i thought it would be nice to ask what is the difference between your constructivism about scientific facts and knowledge on the one hand and full-blown relativism or even the denial of the established facts and the championing of alternative facts on the other hand it is a full-blown relativism what do you think it is full-blown in the sense that it's actually related to the accumulation of conditions necessary to produce fact and if there is something which is now being clear to everybody because the covet 19 is how difficult it is to make and stabilize facts so the word make fact i'm very happy to be uh introduced into official document actually i talk about this question to the queen of of holland a few years in the presence of a queen invited by my friend david so it all depends of course if the word making if making is what fake news believed to be made which means made up of course it would be ridiculous but if by making it means assembling all the condition including media including of course financing and instrument and including of course the witnesses which are themselves the microbes in the case of viruses in the case of our kovid 19 and assemble them in a coherent hall which holds through the dispute then yes facts are made and i'm a full-blown relativist like every scientist actually is a full-blown relativist in that sense that nobody believes that facts are coming from precisely from nowhere this is how i started this lecture tonight so on that question i think now everybody has been enlightened by the kovid 19. now behind your question there is another one which you didn't address directly which is of course the origin of fake news but fake news come from something different from any interest in science i mean these guys don't look at science at all they have decided that whatever scientists say is wrong by definition so it's actually that might be too long but it in my view completely connected to the climate crisis when you have told people that the world in which they are going to live is no longer the one in which they were supposed to go that is the planet modernizing planet they believe nothing of what you say so it's not a question it's not a cook the fake news is not in my view of a of the situation is not a cognitive defect as if people that become silly they don't want to hear what you say period but if your question was about are facts being constructed to be is of course yes where would they come from if they didn't need scientists and if they didn't need institution and if they didn't media and meetings and congress and papers and instruments and all of those things assembled in a coherent whole we would have no science but all of that is now well studied by hundreds of studies and many other cases than the one i i studied so the problem with relativism is that you have to go all the way you have to be full blown because if you stop in the middle and if you use the word make by saying made up scientists makeup fact then of course if you stop in the middle it's ridiculous but if you go on it's fairly obvious and every scientist would agree it's the um to to to kind of follow up on that and perhaps play the devil's advocate that does seem to imply that part of the let's say strength of a fact the degree to which it can make itself felt in a society also depends on obviously also depends on human activity the degree to which we circulated in textbooks into which we converted into technologies and so on so how then for an ordinary person how to differentiate between what they see what is told to be fake news what is told to be real news and so on if you don't have like most of us don't have the competence to evaluate the quality of how a fact is assembled how this one how can one still be a responsible citizen in that kind of world well there's no one there is no rule and no answer for that in the old days the answer would have been be confident into what the scientist's scientific establishment says and confidence would have played role of what you asked unfortunately the scientific process because of its complexity is extremely uh easy to corrupt and it's corrupted by so many different uh sources the media is only one but they are the big one is of course uh businesses and it's of course um sometimes other colleagues and so on and so forth so that uh there is now i mean in fact there was never any sort of legit complete legitimacy of science but the situation is much worse now it's not only i mean studying scientific controversy has been my job for many years so and many people do it so there are ways out of your question which is to make to map the controversies but your question is more serious is that now we are in a situation which is part of a tragedy i mentioned in the lecture uh where facts are systematically attacked in a way that they have no you you a scientist can no longer say one thing immediately it's counter counter act on the social networks so on that situation there is no way to grab the ground here i mean look at the kovid i mean i'm not sure how much energy was put into cleaning the desk on which you are giving this talk i mean you are talking to me on the under is it useful to clean this does it protect you from the coved 19 i've tried to look at the literature on that very simple thing how long does the network the virus just last it's feasible to get some sort of cartography of a controversy but it needs work so if you want to be a citizen and how you say a responsible citizen you have to dive into scientific controversies now it may be sad but it's the situation dying thing in the scientific controversy doesn't mean clicking three clicks onto your facebook it requires what used to be called research in the old days now research means search on the social network and of course that's very different so no there is no way to stabilize this question i mean we are in the middle of scientific controversy we were in the middle of scientific controversy before but now we have this extra massive production of fake news which which complicated enormously the situation but it's again it's not a cognitive problem it's a prime of dividing between people who say your world is not my world get lost that's not something which is amenable to polite discussion on that note i'd like to move to some of the questions that have been sent in by our viewers good um there are dozens and there is also a dozen that has been marked out by by my colleagues that i should put to you but i don't think we have time for them all let's see yes here's one um you uh the question goes you have already addressed uh the problem of living on different planets on planet on you address the problem of living on different planets and the increased level of descent what would you recommend that we do about the rise of conspiracy theories such as q anon and related ideas well this this was not the topic of a lecture but it's interesting to trying to uh connect this um conspiracy not to a cognitive defect on the part of the people who are suddenly in the u.s or in france or in i don't know about holland diving into the conspiracy so strange as a quantum one as if they could not read a scientific paper as if they were not reading the newspaper they do read the newspaper they do have their own cognitive activity uh instead i mean in still working but they live on the different planet in the literal sense of a word that is they apply to what we meaning the academic establishment and the normal people so to speak to which i pertain the principle in english you what english expression whatever my country does right or wrong my country when you say this sentence right or wrong my country it means you are not open to evidence it doesn't it's not important you are addressing a question of fidelity to another country and a people so to speak now why would in the u.s of brazil or holland or france have people expressing this sort of attitude against other which they constituted before are their citizens i mean are they compatriots so to speak the only explanation i can find is that they it's again because of a climate regime they don't want to live in a country where the notion of climate is put into question so you and i don't live on the same planet on that question that's what we say and then the kovid comes and they say no i don't believe in the kovid and then it's whenever anything can go on that sense nothing we don't live on the same the brutalization of politics everywhere because it's not only in the u.s i mean of course it's not so much so strong in europe and in holland which is a highly civilized democracy yet yet it comes everywhere we don't want to hear about what you say about anything covered climate economy whatever so it would be wrong to save a it's a cognitive deficit that's what i mean it's a difference of land of belonging to which land it's a cosmological difference which does not explain of course the bizarre inventions of a conspiracy but conspiracy like quantum is a sort of meta controversy from what i understand it's a meta conspiracy i'm not the specialist of that question by the way um no yeah neither am i um but on the subject of the idea of belonging to land several questions here ask and i'll read one of them whether or not this idea of belonging to land should steer us towards modes of living of indigenous people who already are very we've already always been very familiar with these practices and look to them and learn to learn from them well yes of course this is this is the whole idea and actually the extraordinary change between the 1990s and now is that all of those attitudes which were supposed to be archaic and uh in great need of being modernized modernized which was still the case when i was in africa 50 years ago when i started my work has completely disappeared now i mean obviously if you read a great book frictions by and not sing or many others it's clear that these are the paths this is why i alluded to the notion of divinity by the way which seems to be behind the notion of um the the north sea owns itself again it's not religious it's uh i mean in the sort of christian sense it's it's it's being attentive it's caring for and asking permission for with which is i think of course a great uh set of indigenous traditions which are now part of our futures and no longer the archaic past which has to be overcome yes yes of course very important i read a lot of those things and on the note of um let's say various of the various of these notions taken together so the asking of permission um the returning to the land the the terrestrial way of living and understanding that you that you that you are connected to many other things and depend vitally on many other things earlier in your talk you said that in your more optimistic social democratic version of a parliament of things part of what you intended was to give a voice to scientists who speak on behalf of these entities is that still a part of the more tragic turn that you're thinking about this has taken that's very interesting yes i'd say yes in the sense find out in the now i'm working again a lot with scientists um the one work on critical zone actually the whole exhibition in zkm in council is dedicated to their work and i work a lot with on gaia and so on they are in a tragic situation because of the fake news of course it's me it's very difficult now to regain authority for the scientists for science we do and the the the i don't think we imagine in 1980 the degree of corruption of a of a public sphere where scientists would have enormous difficulty to uh obtain their their freedom of movement and their uh funding for open science i mean it has been very very hard especially for young scientists so now before of course 50 years ago i'm disingenuous here it was nice to criticize the sort of excessive authority but now the tragic situation is that they are in a lack of authority and at least in france i don't know what is in holland but the research system is extremely um largely destroyed by the lack of support and the idea that you could solve all this question of fake news and ecological questions without funding and letting lots of freedom to science and protecting them against corruption is absurd i mean this this is a big big problem it's a very important question if i understood the question rightly and if there's this if there's this problem with with or this change in in scientific authority um some would argue that that is everyone's fault except those except that of the scientists so to remedies no situation we should all you know sit down and listen to what science has to say no no the scientists have been completely foolish in all of that they entered into these discussions for the late 20th century i mean i knew that because i was taken in some of his disputes when i was accused of relativism uh without people understanding what it was they were trying to to protect themselves until the very very late 1990s i'd say uh under the sort of of fake protection of the old philosophy of science who and that since it was facts are facts everybody would agree and we would do something for the climate exactly the opposite happened so yes of course it's a great responsibility the sentence where and still i'm except the one i know most of them are still working on the fantasy that they would be protected against uh dispute if only they could isolate their science from any sort of activity and influence so they have been slightly not too naive i'd say so if the right as i said before they also submitted to uh a level of of uh influence which is especially in the question which i know a little bit on ecological uh question which is uh enormous i mean when you think of what the trump administration did to the science of climate in the us uh they really tried literally to destroy it we are still doing it now even last week so to be a scientist now is a hard job so even though they were naive in the 20th century i recognize how difficult it is right now um and then perhaps as a closing question um if the if scientists simply letting the weight of their authority be felt saying these are the facts they are objective and so on if that is not the solution if that does not work then what is the let's say ideal public role or public manifestation of science that you would envision this is of course i'm terribly biased because i would say that the sts the cartography of controversy the way we not only of course me i've been working on this question 40 years ago now there are lots of young researchers in sds i'd say in a sort of a parochial the sts ways of handling these this this question is the best i don't see how you could regain the authority that was possible for people like pasteur in the 19th century but i think we should fight fake news so i'm still on the same line as i was when i started as a young man that is the more we understand how science is made the best is for science and the easier it would be to gain confidence for it i have to say that it's it's a challenge right now but again the kovid 19 is a good uh clarification we see lots of things have been uh stabilized and proven and other things are still very much in the work in progress and we all collectively citizens patients politicians all work during this six months and we see uh that we need all of those uh i mean not all of us controversy but some of those conferences in order to produce the science which is incredible i mean the amount of science produced in the last six months is just staggering so yes sds is the best thing that happened but again this is my power cure well that's a very that's a very that's a very optimistic note to end on it it is slightly optimistic i agree because unfortunately we have to uh start wrapping up the program um because we're running out of time uh thank you very much professor latour for your lecture and your gracious answers to the questions i wanted to go thank you very much thank you um i also want to thank all of our viewers for joining and remind them that you can also live stream tomorrow's spinoza lens ceremony with not only uh professor latour but also fem kahalsuma beta balfour donna haraway and chantal moof and you can do that on the website of the embassy of the north sea ambassador from the north sea punta nel i would also like to point out that a book of bruno latour's essays is coming out to honor this occasion and will be called had parliament from the dingan over haya and the representative on neet manson and finally i would like to ask you uh watching to consider making a donation to rabbal reflects via the about us section on their website radbal reflects is a non-profit organization so each euro received goes straight to the organization of more interesting lectures and interviews thank you for watching have a good night and see you next time