Bruno Latour, Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime – Polity, September 2018
The present ecological mutation has organized the whole political landscape for the last thirty years. This could explain the deadly cocktail of exploding inequalities, massive deregulation, and conversion of the dream of globalization into a nightmare for most people.
What holds these three phenomena together is the conviction, shared by some powerful people, that the ecological threat is real and that the only way for them to survive is to abandon any pretense at sharing a common future with the rest of the world. Hence their flight offshore and their massive investment in climate change denial. The Left has been slow to turn its attention to this new situation. It is still organized along an axis that goes from investment in local values to the hope of globalization—and just at the time when, everywhere, people dissatisfied with the ideal of modernity are turning back to the protection of national or even ethnic borders.
This is why it is urgent to shift sideways and to define politics as what leads toward the Earth and not toward the global or the national. Belonging to a territory is the phenomenon most in need of rethinking and careful redescription; learning new ways to inhabit the Earth is our biggest challenge. Bringing us down to earth is the task of politics today.
Looks interesting, and am particularly intrigued by the idea that “belonging to a territory is the phenomenon most in need of rethinking and careful redescription; learning new ways to inhabit the Earth is our biggest challenge”.
Progressive Geographies 
Reblogged this on Paulo Jorge Vieira.
“The present ecological mutation has organized the whole political landscape for the last thirty years.” sad, what happened to the recognition of the evolving multiplicities/hybrids in STS/ANT, why the turn away from the actual diversity of the many and towards evangelizing in the name of the one?
And even if we few readers of academic texts buy into this new definition of the situation what use is it in political terms, wouldn’t new ways of highspeed mass conversion be the most pressing problem?
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#Latour is correct of course. But this will have no real effect except to make people like me feel that we are right and in good company with our thinking. We are validated by Latour.
Yes they are planning an “escape.” Makes the movie SNOWPIERCER a reality as a metaphor.
I’m curious to see what he says about ‘belonging to a territory’, and especially if that explicitly interrogates what a territory is or might be. Facing Gaia is still on a ‘to-read’ pile, but this book might be the inspiration to look into his work on this theme more generally.
would be a welcome change in his recent style if he does make it explicit what territory is or could be or even how one might go about investigating such matters in any depth.
reminds me of this “Koopman, for example, argues that Foucault is heavily indebted to Deleuze’s account of philosophical problematization (Genealogy as Critique, 292-293). Thomas Osborne, by contrast, suggests that there is a significant division between Deleuze, as well as Bergson, for whom the concern with problems remains a resolutely philosophical exercise, and the more analytic orientation to problems developed by Canguilhem as well as Foucault.21 I prefer this latter view, and I want to develop it further in exploring how Foucault’s notion of problematization might be used to inform a mode of analysis that is broadly empirical in its orientation.” there is unfortunately a third more theological/prophetic approach which just to proclaim that things are so…
https://nonsite.org/article/on-problematization
Will await the book with interest. If he doesn’t really explore this, then the provocation, which is intriguing, might be the spur for my next piece on territory.
either way be interested in what you make of it.
Empirical studies cannot be undertaken without delving into the statistical workl of #NassimTaleb. #BlackSwan; #FooledByRandomness; #Antifragile He has turned all statistical studies on their heads. https://www.academia.edu/37221402/THE_STATISTICAL_CONSEQUENCES_OF_FAT_TAILS_TECHNICAL_INCERTO_COLLECTION_ This is a recent paper heavy in mathematics.