Customer Reviews

Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy

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This difficult and challenging book provides a vision of a whole new politics, and, more important, a whole new "common world"--the totality, the cosmos, that we humans and nonhumans all share.
The book begins inauspiciously, at least for English-language readers, by misusing the term "political ecology" rather badly, and doing some mild slander in the process. For instance (p. 20): "It [political ecology] claims to defend nature for nature's sake--and not as a substitute for human egotism--but in every instance, the mission it has assigned itself is carried out by humans and is justified bythe well-being, the pleasure, or the good conscience of a small number of carefully selected humans--usually American, male, rich, educated, and white." From this and further points, it becomes obvious that Latour is talking about old-fashioned environmental politics of the 1950s and 1960s, and insultingly mischaracterizing even that. Women and European thinkers and indigenous peoples and others excluded by Latour were actively involved from the beginning. More to the point, "political ecology" has a definite meaning in English: the branch of anthropology (and, now, geography and political science) that studies, generally from a critical point of view, political impacts on indigenous people and their environments, and on the global community. This field arose in the 1970s in reaction against many of the very things Latour denouces. Latour never discusses this field at all.
He also denounces Science, without making clear until later that he means not actual scientific practice, but the sort of dogmatic, ex-cathedra, It's All Facts stuff that the media love and that real scientists often hate.
Finally, he admits to a skeptical position about Facts. This has led to his being labeled a wild-eyed constructionist in some quarters. He pulls sharply back from such a position, explaining that he is fine with reality; the problem is that all the interesting questions in environmental politics are not yet to the "fact" stage. In regard to genetically modified organisms, to take an extreme case, we don't have a clue what these new life forms will do to humans or to the planet; the scientists are mystified, and cannot speak with authority. Other current world problems--stopping AIDS, dealing with global warming, understanding the role of biodiversity--are also very much in play. So sciences evolve in the midst of public discourses.
Finally, Latour shares two vices with many French philosophes: he writes in a turgid and neologistic style, and he buries much of his best stuff in the footnotes. Do not under any circumstances miss the footnotes if you read this book! Even if you skim it!
Readers, do not be put off. Persist. There is good stuff to come.
First, Latour destroys the concept of "nature," i.e. the unity of stuff that isn't people and thus is objective and has no voice. He sees "natures" instead: all those disparate things out there--elephants, rivers, stars--that have their own identities, and that have a voice or need a voice in the collective. Next, he does the same for science: he speaks of sciences, not Science. Certainly, whatever may have once unified physics, political science, and everything in between is now rather worn. Sciences is indeed preferable usage.
Then things get really interesting. If all those natures have their voices, and all those sciences can give them a voice that other humans can understand (i.e. explain what they are and what they might need), we can take them into account in politics. Politicians will have to figure out how to include them in the collective enterprise. Economists will have to re-do economics to take into account the principle that nonhumans are (in some sense--to be debated) part of the action, not mere objects of action. Most interesting of all, moralists will have to face the disappearance of a "nature" that is beyond and indifferent to the ethical universe. Nonhumans will have to be treated as ends, like humans (Latour is a Kantian, at least at some level). How much we can do to them will have to be decided democratically in the future; the point now is that we can't just trash them for no good reason. (At first I was afraid, when he talked about eliminating the facts/values distinction, that he really meant that; no, he means we have to take both into account at every stage in ongoing debates and researches. Medical researchers do that already. At least the good ones do.)
Latour analogizes life to parliament. We have had a bicameral legislature with Nature as one house, Society made up of various cultures on the other. (He takes anthropologists to task for believing in this, and opposing a chaos of relativized cultures to a "mononature." Not quite fair. Most of us in anthro are somewhat beyond that.) We humans and nonhumans now need an upper house of perplexity and consultation--i.e., trying to figure out what is going on--and a lower house of hierarchy and institution--i.e., of prioritizing and deciding what to do (given what is going on, and our inevitable uncertainty about it). The cosmos, the common world, gets built by constant work by these two "houses." I like this image.
After discussing in detail what the scientists, moralists, and all can bring to this, Latour ends with an all too vague overview of the future. The shining city on the hill is visible only through mists at a thousand miles' distance. Maybe, at this stage, we can do no better.
Latour ends with some notes on anthropology, including remarks on how similar his vision is to that of the Amazonian Native Americans. I, too, am struck by similarities; Latour's view is strangely like that of the First Nations of the Northwest Coast of North America. For them, every animal, plant, and rock has its spirit, and all these spirits are part of society, just like humans. We constantly interact and communicate with them, and have to take them into account (a Latourian phrase) as persons--not human persons, but real persons nevertheless. Shorn of the literal belief in spirits, this is pretty much Latour's view.
Many Latour-like ideas are appearing, perhaps in more prosaic and tentative form, in other writers' work. The latest issue of SCIENCE has a number of articles on bringing sciences, politics, and values together in an ongoing exploration. Society seems really to be groping toward Latour's common world.

If you're not well disposed towards Latour, it can't be because he didn't go out of his way to win you over. He writes so clearly and is at such pains to help alleviate the gross misunderstandings his work attracts, that it can only be spite that fuels the science warriors. This is another groundbreaking book, and another presentation in some ways of the thought of Michel Serres, in slightly less obtuse prose and with Latour's own marvellous conceptual innovations thrown into the mix. Serres may well one day be recognised as the person who most understood what the world in our times is about, but probably not as a result of his own books, which scare people. Latour's taking up of the baton from Serres into new areas is easily the best entry point to this vital tradition of thought.

The title and cover blurb would have you believe Latour has restricted himself here to a chat about political ecology. In reality that's only a springboard to analysing two much bigger questions: how do we best construct democratic bodies, and then how should we govern them? As in his earlier work, Latour shows that it is the objects and devices we use which are the great black hole in our thought, and when we conceive of democratic bodies it's as a great mass of people, and not much else. Importantly, because Latour has always said, and continues to here, that what does most of the work of holding these bodies together is the objects and machines they create and use, he proffers the word 'collective', a less human-centric term, to designate any 'social' body. This is a term very similar in its meaning to Pierre Levy's usage in 'collective intelligence' - both Levy and Latour draw from Serres here.

As technologies have grown in scale and complexity, noting that `technologies' for Latour are institutions, including all of the humans that are required for their functioning, they've reached a threshold whereby `global' processes such as climate are also affected. Once past this threshold the results, for example ozone depletion, are not at the usual localisable scale, but rather force us to act for humanity as a whole, as effects become non-localisable. (Serres says that this marks the beginning of an `objective morality', where actions are forced upon us and morality therefore undergoes a type of phase change, from reasoned choice, to navigation through objective exigencies). Our collective of humans and non-humans, now a sort of tectonic plate of its own, and its politics must now take these planetary factors into account - thus the birth of political ecology. Political ecology because it's not just a case of "who's going to miss a few species of butterfly?", but also, "who turned up the heat?" Global warming, and other stonking great collective objects, and the problem of what we are going to do about them. And who or what is this we?

This we is the collective. It's quite possible to read the paragraph above and think you're seeing the standard environmentalist argument that has become common in the past couple of decades i.e. humans have tampered with the planet, and now must act to save the planet and themselves. But this misses the crucial difference Latour introduces: there are more non-humans in this we than humans. We share the problems with the objects; politics isn't just humans deciding on human problems anymore, because these global objects force their way into our parliaments, demanding attention. Our parliaments are now collectives of humans and non-humans. This has happened because in the past we've ignored the profound co-creation of man and machine, and it's only now that hundreds of years of this co-creation have produced global scale technological effects, which force themselves upon us, that we can suddenly realise what's been missed. Latour uses this historical outbreak of political ecology to then retrofit political philosophy in general i.e. how should we have been doing politics in the first place with objects, not just now when they're forcing us to consider the question; thus political ecology merely as a launch pad to the main topic of the book, which is nothing less than a reinvention of political philosophy.

Latour proceeds to analyse what he calls the `skills of the collective', needed for governance of any group. He then shows how, with a little tweaking, traditional concerns such as science, politics, economics, morality and administration can be used to provide all of these required skills. This will however require a different mode of operation for each of these areas, one more attuned with the need to incorporate objects correctly in our collectives.

There's a summary of the argument compressed into only a few pages at the back of the book, if you're not sure about reading the whole thing. This review hasn't even touched upon the central role of the fact/value distinction to the argument, a longstanding academic trope that Latour completely demystifies in the process of breathing new life into the essential democratic concept of the separation of powers. A book to buy and read, again and again - use your Science Wars texts to wrap the fish and chips.

I just want to give some words of caution to the future buyer. I bought this book out of intellectual curiosity. I wanted to learn more about the relationship between politics and nature. At the time I bought this book it only had favorable reviews. I read the first two chapters of the book with much difficulty. I found Dr. Latour's writing hard to understand and make sense out of. His writing is fantastic in the sense that he knows what he is talking about but it was extremely difficult for me to understand it. I am not sure if this had anything to do with the translation.

After the two chapters I gave up the reading and picked up another book to read (one of R. Dahl's). Now I do not want to blame Latour or his translator for my lack of making sense of the content, but for those who do not have an appropriate background on Latour's translated work, this book might be of extreme difficulty to grasp.

However, because I wanted this book to be known to other people I ended up giving it to a retired college math professor who might understand or appreciate Latour's work.

This book is absolutely appalling. Period.

It is not a horrible book because of the ideas in the book. This is the worst book I've ever read because Latour utterly and completely fails to communicate any ideas in his writing in a clear manner. His writing style, choice of language, and sentence structure is so verbose, vague, and overly complex that he fails to actually tell the reader anything. I was forced to read each sentence and paragraph over and over again to try and figure out what Latour was trying to say. Each sentence is too long and contains too many different ideas; all the words are too vague and leave the reader with no concrete meaning; and none of the ideas seem to be clear or concisely worded. Indeed, Latour and the editor of this book should be ashamed of having ever published such a bewildering group of sentences. The only reason I even read it was for some graduate classes and now I keep the book around simply because it is so poorly written that it is a bit of humorous novelty in my library.

There is a very common French political discourse in which the writer takes the position of Guru Who Will Reveal Truth through Cryptic Raving. Latour is very good at this discourse, but it is really just Garbage Talk. Garbage Talk is a method in which one says the trivial and the well-known, but crammed with neologisms, and repeated many times in different cryptic ways. Well, in fact the Emperor Has No Clothes. The two reviews of this book on Amazon are light years ahead of Latour in cogency and promise.

Latour starts the book off as follows: "What is to be done with political ecology? Nothing. What is to be done? Political ecology!" This is the essence of Garbage Talk, and it is all downhill from there.

Neologism is at the heart of Garbage Talk (Discours de Poubelles in French). On p. 10 Latour defines "Science* as the politicization of the sciences through epistemology in order to render ordinary political life impotent through the threat of an incontestable nature." Latour's Garbage Talk replaces reason and logic with epithet and bombast. This is not okay. I am not free to define Science in such a stupid a derogatory way, and neither is Latour. In fact, there is a serious literature on the relationship between science, politics, and social policy, but none of this comes through in Latour's ravings.

The content of this volume is a rehash of Rouseauian romantic populism, with absolutely no new insights. True to Garbage Talk form, there is virtually no analysis of any issue in political ecology, and it is quite impossible to pin Latour down on any point.