 Welcome to the fourth future lecture series. It is a hot afternoon. I'm so glad you're all here. I hope you have grabbed a bottle of water out there. My name is Nils Buband and I'm also happy to welcome you if you're watching this on live stream next door or on a podcast sometime later in cyberspace. I don't know about cyberspace, but I think the buzz in this room is extraordinary. It is the fourth futures lecture, but I think it's the biggest ever. And it's extraordinary, I think, because we're honored today to be able to welcome an extraordinary guest speaker, Professor Bruno Latour. Before I introduce him, let me say a little bit about the background for the event and about the program tonight. The futures lecture series was created two years ago by the School of Culture and Society at Ohu's University and its format is fairly simple. Bring in the best and most innovative scholars from the humanities and ask them to answer the biggest questions of all. What kind of world do we live in and what kind of possible futures are out there for all of us. Finally, add to panelists or discussants who will push those questions and in the end, hopefully if there is time today too, we will put the questions to you or rather allow you to put the questions to today's speaker. The aim is also simple, but actually also hard. It is to demonstrate that the time in which the humanities could afford to be passive is over. The world needs the humanities more than ever, but for the humanities to live up to that task, to grasp that possibility, they may have to transform themselves radically. I think no one is more eminently suited for this double task of assertion of relevance on the one hand and of remaking or rethinking than Bruno Latour. For four decades, Professor Latour has urged the social and human sciences to rethink themselves and he is one of the most influential philosophers in the world today. His influence, I think, is due to the fact that he is actually so much more than a philosopher. He is a sociologist of science, an anthropologist, a curator of exhibitions, and an activist. Bruno Latour is a professor at CNSPOR, the prestigious Paris Institute for Political Studies where he is also a scientific director of the Media Lab. Professor Latour has held honorary positions in the University of Amsterdam and London School of Economics and in 2013 he was given the Holberg Prize for Excellence in the Humanities. Each of his more than two dozen books has been groundbreaking in its own right, reshaping the way we in the social and human sciences understand and study technology, science, democracy, religion, modernity, the social, politics, earthworms, monkeys, humans and more. Professor Latour's work is thoroughly innovative, consistently challenging, and frequently actually I find at least witty in spite of the seriousness of the themes that it addresses. And there is no way in which I could probably introduce you to the nuance and breath of Professor Latour's work in a short introduction if ever. So instead I thought I would tell you a joke. It is a joke that my daughter who is 11 taught to me, so if you wanted to be kind you could pretend to find that it's funny. Anyway, here it goes, a man walks into a bar, a large frog is attached to his head, it seems to grow from the man's head. Oh my God, says the bartender, how did that happen? Well, says the frog, it began with a pain in the ass. It works slightly better in Danish when you say in Bül Iroon as a melodic nest to in Bül Iroon, but a pain in the ass will work as well. A talking frog, a bartender who invokes a God in which he likely does not believe and the possibility that humans are merely hemorrhoids in the backside of amphibians. I think there is no better way more appropriate to introduce the philosophy of Professor Latour and also the theme of his talk tonight. We live, one might say, in a world where frogs have begun to speak to nature. That mute entity of enlightenment thought has begun unexpectedly and loudly to talk back to us, rising temperatures, ocean acidification, freak storms, flash floods, unseasonably hot in Denmark and very cold in Paris, invasive species, climbing extinction rates and climate refugees. Something clearly is being said here, but who speaks and what is being said? How should we reorient our concepts, our thinking, our methods in order to listen to this? Or are we better off doing what we've always done? This latter option, doing what we've always done, is the conventional option of the modern world, the world of realpolitik and real science. And yet, it is becoming harder to ignore the voices for these politics and sciences of the real. Take frogs, for instance. Amphibian populations around the world are plummeting. They're victims of a chytrid fungus carried by the African clawed frog, Sinopus lavis, if there are any biologists in here. The frog became a global species that was able to infect other amphibians because it is used as a pet and in the medical research trade for pregnancy tests, for instance. The human cause, the extinction rates of amphibians that are due to many other reasons than this, but this is part of it, is such that some scientists now worry that the extinction of amphibians might trigger a mass extinction event on a scale that is equivalent to the four, sorry, five others that have occurred in the Earth's history in the last half billion years. I think it is fair to say that humans really are a pain in the ass to frogs, and maybe their extinction will turn out to be a pain for us as well. Professor Latour's work has always taught us to rethink our thinking, to reset it, to listen to frogs and to other non-humans, to include them in our analysis of the present, of politics and of the future. I think I can promise you that today will be an example of this. It is also, so I gather, a really unconventional presentation today, so I think you really have something to look forward to. The presentation is called Why Gaia is not the Globe and Why Our Future Depends on Not Confusing the Two. Please help me in giving a warm hand and welcome to Professor Latour. Thank you very much. I think it's fitting for our friends to be linked to frogs to start with, although I think the first time that I was introduced by a talk about hemorrhoids, but you have to learn. My talk is about orientation to the future, or disorientation. The disorientation, which was mentioned before, that is, it's very hot here and very cold in Paris, and we have to move north in order to find this beautiful weather. But also, disorientation and reorientation, and that's why I ask to do a little drawing. And maybe you want, because I was told it's more like a seminar thing, a piece of paper, because I might ask you a question and make you scribbles. So don't hesitate to take a little piece of paper and try to answer the question which I'm going to put to you. We are going to, in spite of the heat and the size of the audience, try to make it more similar. The first thing I will start in the orientation thing is a very famous text, which I'm sure many of you know, which is Edgar Paul, Mildstrom. And if you remember the story, it's not very far from you, it's in the Lofoten. The fisherman is in the Mildstrom, which is a nice metaphor of the situation which was just summarized before. And he is taken by the whirlwind, and he noticed that there are lots of things which are disappearing here, especially his two brothers who are jumped in the sea and disappear, and that the boat on which he is is also disappearing, but then suddenly he remains very quiet in spite of the catastrophe in which he is, and it's an interesting part of the novel, because he realizes that his catastrophe is very quiet. And then he noticed something which is a difference between some type of object which goes straight into the hole and some type of object which in spite of the fact that they are in the whirlwind actually float. And that's especially true of a barrel. I ask to be able to write on the blackboard, but my writing is awful, so don't try to read what I've written. The key point is that it stick to the barrel and emerge unscathed from the Mildstrom in spite of the fact that the boat is two brothers and everything else has been sort of sucked by the very powerful Mildstrom. So what I'm interested in doing with you today is sort of detection. So we are in a catastrophe, but we are very quiet, and we try to detect what the difference between those things which sink in and those things that float. So it's a slight difference. We have to do a sort of sorting mechanism and a trial so that we can detect what is disappearing very quickly, and what can float. This is what we cannot expect for more. And that thing I said in his marvelous book on the mushroom and the end of the world, we live in the ruin. So don't expect to escape from the Mildstrom, but try to get yourself tied and attached to what is not actually going to be sucked by the thing. So this is my little introduction. Now things become simple and then more complicated. The simple thing is how do we detect what is the test which allows us to make the difference between what is sucked in and what is floating around. We have one orientation mechanism which we have been using for many years, which is the idea that there is something which we call a modernizing front or frontier, which is the one I've studied for about 40 years, which behind it is basically archaism. And in front of it is something which is precisely the title of your lecture series, The Future, and something which, toward which we are supposed to move on, right? And the powerful feature of this modernizing front is that if you are here, you can be easily accused of sticking to the old ways of being archaic or being passe, et cetera, et cetera. We have dozens of these little words which allows us to sort of organize and sort of make a gradient between those who want to go back here and want those who are moving here, okay? The modernizing front. Now it exists actually as many political scientists have shown in two different gradients. One of them is about the mores of the ways of life and the other is about the economy. So I'm sure people in this room, we divided because some of us are clearly enthusiastic about moving in the future in the mores called liberalization or all the shackles from the past and in economy as well, which is embracing the globalization as much as we can. Some people of course are critical of both and they would much prefer not to go toward the liberalization of the ways of life and to be as protected as possible against the danger of globalization. And I think many of us we hesitate and sometimes we are fairly happy to embrace liberalization of the mores but somewhat suspicious of embracing the globalization of the economy. And you could also be the opposite which is usually more on the many parties on the sort of central middle right which is that they embrace fairly well a large enthusiastic appeal for globalization of the economy but when it comes to ways of life, sexual habits and so on and family they prefer to stick to the older system, okay? Now this is not what I'm interested in because this difference is actually not that big. There is one really big feature which is the one that organize this direction and here we forget about the fact that it's different when it's more an economy. You see anything? Yeah, it's nice. Now we need to name those two attractors. One attractors, I would call it the globe. In the discussion we might discuss is it, is the name a good name or not? It doesn't matter too much here. This we would call and it's again, a strange and too much a simple word. Let's say the land, the land of old, the one out of which we were moved by the movement of modernization. The word doesn't matter too much because we are going to try to see if we cannot think differently. But yet what is clear is that the modernizing front is still in our head. So that it's still organized the way we share and we distribute what is progressive or regressive. So it's still our compass, if you want. It's the way we organize ourselves and the way we look at the future as something which is organized along this line here. Now all of that works fairly nicely. But on one condition is that the globe is still the attractive horizon toward which we are actually moving. Now what happens when this horizon of the globe is actually suddenly missing? And the way it is missed, there are many ways to show it, but the very striking ways to understand that it misses of course what happened with the ecological mutation right now, as if people were suddenly realizing that the modernizing horizon toward which they were all sort of moving without being too sure it's good or bad was actually suddenly missing. For one very simple reason, which was demonstrated beautifully in Paris in December, which is that when you count all the contribution of the different countries which were asked to give the vision of the future at the COP 21st in Paris in December, suddenly when you submit you realize that there is someone speaking here, or is it translated? No, it's not translated. Is there someone translating? No, because there's a background, someone is talking to me, but I don't understand what he says, so it complicates my lecture. What is interesting is that when people brought together all these plans for the 2030 and 2050 at the COP and suddenly people clearly realized that there was no planet could absorb all those projections of the globe. So the globe is much too big, so to speak, not the real globe, but the mantle globe of the modernizing horizon is much too big to be suddenly squeezed inside the planet. And what happens when the globe is actually suddenly something people realize there is no way toward it? This is what's happening, and I think that's where we are all here somewhat in a state of angst because there is a sort of huge whirling movement which could be called the global backlash which we have not only in every country of Europe, in every single country of Europe, but throughout the world, in the US, in Indonesia, everywhere, which is that suddenly people realizing that the globe is not there are shifting their passion, interest, future horizon to something which look slightly like the end of old, but it's actually, of course, a new land of old, that is the land, basically, of made-up identity and invented tradition. I would be very happy to say that this happens only in France with the National Front, only in Poland with the new election, only in Italy with Badania, only in America with Monsieur Trump, but it also exists here in Denmark, this utmost civilized, open and democratic nation. So everywhere we feel the whirling movement of entire nation, like England, like France, Poland, Holland, et cetera, which are moving there, not to the old land, of course, because this land, of course, is a reinvention, which is certainly completely different from the globe, and we are all lost because we also lost our ways of organizing position as progressive or regressive. I know political scientists say this is populism, this is reactionary, this is a return of the sort of neo-fascist movement, et cetera, but I think that all of those labels are actually dangerous because they think as something which is the return of something old. Whereas I think it's better and more interesting to study them as something quite new, first time in the history, short history of globalization, where people realize that the globe will never be there. So we are somewhat, it's a metaphor, of course, in the situation of people who would be in a plane, if you want, and they are been traveling in this plane, I'm not going to draw the plane, we are moving toward the globalizing airport, and then the pilot says, ladies and gentlemen, this is a pilot speaking, I'm really sorry, but the globe has disappeared. So we are not going to land on it. And then the plane sort of shifts back and toward where it was coming from, and then the pilot, this is your pilot speaking again, ladies and gentlemen, I'm sorry to say that this one here is actually complete ruin and it doesn't exist anymore because the new land to which we want to go back as protecting ourselves through identity politics is a completely impossible things after what has been done with the globalization. Okay, so you are in the, this is actually a nice metaphor, it's a big plane, I'm the pilot and I'm saying, well, I'm sorry, but the place where you wanted to go and the place where you were maybe sort of tempted to go back have disappeared. Then what do you do? Well, you look out to the windows of the plane to try to see where would you land. Where is the alternative to land? And that's what I'm interested in trying to draw. Where is, oh, here is it. So see, all of that was the simple part because I think even though I'm not a political scientist, everybody would agree that understanding very, very carefully what it is that we are tempted by in this moment where all the people simultaneously, globally, exactly in the same terms are turning their attention to identity politics and of course the most interesting and telling aspect is Brexit, which is quite extraordinary in this case because England was the country of globalization, it invented it, it invented the world market and it's the one which is shrinking back to a small, quite uninteresting and rainy island which no one had expected. So now we have to reorient ourselves a little bit and that's where, this is why I needed, we sort of thought that the globe as a horizon was defined by a cartography, we have a cartographic definition of the globe. So what I'd like to contrast, and that's the title of my talk and the abstract, is a globe in the cartographic definition which is in fact, and here there are many people from the STS community, they would recognize the situation, a largely social and elaborated construction from the 17th century through basically cartography, and I will symbolize just by the sort of cartographic grid that we know very well and of course we were very happy when we added to it the blue planet from the NASA etc. We all know this history of the feeling of the globe. The prime with this idea of the globe is that it's actually viewed from the position which is from nowhere. I mean you could say an STS people will tell you what exactly instrument in astronomy and physics allow you to see the Earth as a globe but for most of us it's actually a position which is not situated as Donna Haraway would say. It's not situated, not it. It's a sort of idea of what you would see if you were in a place from nowhere and in addition you compare this globe with a whole series of other globe, the other planet etc. and you dive all of those things in something which we know as the universe or nature. This is basically what has been sort of captured or kidnapped by the notion of globalization of second nature, this is first nature, second nature meaning the economy. So globalization is a sort of fusion of one definition of a globe coming from cartography, physics, astronomy with a completely different but visually and symbolically similar image which is of course fused in the word globalization. Okay, now the strange thing I'm interested in discussing with you and of course this is why I'm very pleased to be with my friend from STS and with Isabelle Stengers and Anna to discuss afterwards is that the place where we do reside here has known of a character of a globe. So, and that's why I need you to take a piece of paper and begin to write down the differences between these two sorts of figures because this other figure, and here I'm going to draw very bad drawing, not only which is true because I'm a terrible draft man but also because we strangely enough have no imaginary, no visual imaginary for what we reside in. And this is why I opened an exhibition in Castle in May called Reset Modernity just how do you visualize where we are which should be a simple question. Philosophers had imagined that we knew where we reside by saying, ah, the scientific word view is one thing but the lived word is something else. So, we had an idea for phenomenology for many philosophical movements for the humanities, for poetry that we could actually situate ourselves as a lived word completely different from the scientific word. This was, so to speak, the 20th century solution to the problem we are dealing with today. But of course now with the question of the ecological mutation of the anthropocene it doesn't work, we don't want to be in a lived word we want the word, not the lived word. Or we want the word of life, not the word, the lived word which will let the other word the one known by scientists to this view from nowhere because now we can't just see the word from nowhere we need to situate ourselves. So, my clumsy... we are here. It's not so nice, I agree. It is a small, thin, varnish or a skin, if you wish. Tiny, tiny skin, a few kilometers here, a few kilometers there which some scientists call critical zone to describe that it's where we live and everything else live. It's not seen from above it's not seen from a position of anywhere it's actually always seen, and here you see how terrible I am by scientists and activists, politicians, citizens laterally. It's seen laterally, not from above. We live, I mean, look at the gardens here you don't see it from above, you see it debier, if I can say that. Which is not at all the same imagination as when you suppose that you are here and then you look at the cartography from above and you see it. And it's not the same thing as saying I'm a lived word and I live a science the word of reality to the scientist. So, one of the important things here and I've shown that in the Gifford Lectures is that here we have something which we could call and Husserl would also call Galileo which is the idea that you can see the globe from elsewhere, from the universe and here you have something which I associate with a character which for me is exactly as important with Lovelock. That is completely different definition where there is something highly special to the Earth which is why he calls it actually why not giving it its name Gaia. By the way, if you know the invention of the word Gaia while Lovelock was trying to find a name his friend, the novelist, the authors suggested Gaia which is a nice term which is actually linked to the Milestorm argument and Lovelock says Gaia? No, no, no said something he said no, no Gaia and Gaia as a state but Gaia is also a good word. So, yeah because it's not a globe it's a thin pellicule of slightly fragile robust set of intertwined life form which is very different from the vision you could have of life if you have this vision and which is just as scientific which is of course the reason why in STS we are working on this. So here basically you could say this is the realm of what would be called if a little pedantic French philosopher is allowed to use a bit of Latin which I know you should not do anymore it's res extensa which is this idea that there is an isomorphic space in which planets and everything else is situated. Here it's completely different there are things in which space is situated I'm not saying as a very nice expression for that it's that she said this space here is not scalable it's not made to be scalable it's entirely made to be scalable So what I think would be useful to orient ourselves is to have a different name for this one and for this one not the difference between the real scientific word and the lived word of subjectivity to entirely objective definition but pointing to different set of entities different set of lived form so to speak So I propose a little operation of excision if you want which is we call that the universe and this we would call because critical zone is a bit strange so we could reuse the old word of fusis fusis is the word which was used by the Greek to talk and many I mean the whole medieval tradition to talk about everything which is actually in movement generation and death as well as movement and as you know and Isabel Stengas has written extensively on that when Galileo decided to get and to invent this position which would be basically the Galilean universe the idea was to cut out of all the evidence of the fusis only one of them which was movement and space but at the time of the Anthropocene we cannot limit this definition because we live in it so I propose this is a proposition that we cut out in the universe this little very thin, very special very fragile very lively very folded part of the universe fusis now one last point because before I get to the next part and which of course would be of interest to STS people here on the universe which is everything but fusis there is not much there is a sort of epistemological piece if you want because the debates, the fights between the different version of science and the general and the rest of the public is not actually so tense you might have different view of the moon different view of the cosmos different view of the inside of the earth but really I mean you know nothing right and there is a privilege and a legitimate privilege of a scientist on that part because the instrument and the way and the distance with the thing they know is actually in their hands so you can learn from them you can ignore what they do but basically the discussion would be difficult at least there would be a greater symmetry and if you say I think the Big Bang is not that at all they would say sorry but can you get out of my laboratory or something now this is not the case with here everything which is there is not the realm of epistemological piece it is the thing we love to study in STS which is the situation of epistemological warfare and of course one of them very well known by all of you is the climate question okay so if you agree with my two first point one of them is that we were oriented by the modernist sort of line of vector and that now the two end of these vectors vanished and that we had to be disoriented and the second point that we might be interested in a definition not of a lived word but of actually getting into a objective quotation mark scientific quotation mark shared quotation mark disputed which we would call fuses or to give it this name Gaia then things become politically interesting and here you need to take your little piece of paper because we now have to work out our test so far the difficulty of orienting ourselves was due that every single time someone had an hesitation about going this way he or she was accused of being reactionary archaic, passé or looking for a nostalgic view of the past and I'm sorry to say we are in a protestant country so I can ask you to make a little consciousness getting into your own soul and ask you to remember last time maybe five minutes ago or two days ago or two years ago when you told of a position that it was archaic or not modern and that you actually preemptively condemn a position because it was not oriented in this direction and again it can be on economy but it can be on ways of life etc and I'm not going to ask you to say out loud what and when you did this the last time but if we were in the seminar it would be fun to do so what I'm proposing now is to make a third attractor to try if we could escape the pre-emptive strike which has and I don't have time to develop this point which has moralized politics as soon as the notion of modernization became entrenched which is of course dependent which century you consider but is there a way to be able to sort out position about anything like agriculture, food, transportation more etc without immediately be brought back to this situation here so imagine yourself you are now here you are in the middle not of two attractors which we could still call the land in its two definition that is the what Husserl will call the ashi soil that is a really old aborigines soil if you want and the neo soil and then you have the globe now we know the globe as this very strange character the first one I said it before is that it's enormously too big to be shrunk into the planet but as all the people who study economics know very well it has a secondary contradictory feature to be completely provincial what we call by the global is that means that we obey a very very tiny numbers of people compared to those who are actually composing the earth and I'm not talking only about humans here so to be globalized means really provincialized by very few and small numbers of people so this is why the global never works it's too big to be shrunk into the planet and it's too small to be actually representative of where we are so what would happen if we were trying to sort out position are they progressive or regressive not according to this modernizing front going this way but if they were stepping looking to this different land soil wheat gaya earth gyre whatever so you see the exercise the exercise is to take the thing we shared the one we are we value we know and we have many encounters when we are sort of shocked to hear when we criticize the globalization but you want to go back to and usually five minutes later it's the cave where you have this very strange system of light which is chandel how do you say chandel in English how do you say it candle you all have that if you have slightest interest in ecology and if you make a slightest critique of anything about globalization immediately you are told in the cave or the equivalent of that and if you want to do that on science five minutes later you are yes but this is the sort of argument and they make sense this argument because the orientation movement that we have in our disposition is actually not much more than that if it's not going there then it's going there there's no alternative we are very poor in inventing futures and every time we invent future we have to map them here and the most extraordinary element of that is the complete impossibility of the ecological movement and parties to escape the trap of being neither left nor right if you begin to say no no I'm not left or right they say ah then you are from the right projecting this question here that ecological movement and parties even though they have mostly disappeared at least in France and all of the mass of people doing activism everywhere in the world they are not looking at this line they are with all the mess, difficulty confusion looking to a different territories which is of course if you do a little bit of geometry here it's like the middle of this place but it's not it's another place it's another attractor and this is why I'm interested in many different things which is to try to define the land the soil the earth on which actually we are we would need in order to be able to sort the different vested in these two attractors each of them has now disappeared if not it's very clear that we will all move to the identity politics in spite of what we say we can claim it look at the complete impossibility of democrat and republican in the US to just stop Trump they can't argue with people who say so panic by the globalization whatever we do we want to be back to the land of old give us our identity everything we would be able to sacrifice it's like a sort of going to the boat when the thing sink so the solution if you follow me is to try to get let's collectively try to draw the figure and this element here okay and I have a few minutes left to do this exercise and I need again my blackboard and my excellent diagram I'm known for my bad diagrams doesn't matter because I like them so we have three attractors and not two so we have we call it the land it's very bad but it's a concept so we have a globe which is too quality of being too big and too small and let's say we have the Earth but of course we should not confuse it with the globe now what are the characteristics that we could actually begin to distribute if we were doing this sort of selective test and here we need I'm going to do it but this is a seminar so you have to do it as well with your own value and we will do it in the discussion because my obsession might not be your obsession and I hope not actually so for instance one other thing here which is an extremely important value is the sort of protection and we know from workers dispute during the last two century that every time and this is Polanis as well as Marx and everybody else as soon as workers or laborers talk about protection they were immediately told that this was something they should abandon for the global so the movement was on the contrary no protection which is a very already very complicated value because most of the movement towards the what I call the great global backlash to identity requires protection for a good reason which is that there is no life in the globe the globe brings no protection and that cannot be a value either and we should be able to express this protection is necessary without being immediately shift back to the archaic resisting definition of what protection is so we need to invent a definition of protection as a necessary value which would be happy to put somewhere here so the earth whatever we do on earth and not only us but even the frogs and even the french frogs have to be protected I'm not talking about protecting of species you understand this is a concept of values when someone tells us you are archaic regressive traditionalist want protection we should not be preemptively accused of immediately shifting along the line ideas I drew here backwards we should say no no no wait a minute we want to go here we want to be able to define something which we share with other species which is something around the notion to be elaborated of protection it won't be the same past it won't be an archaic definition of protection but we have to recognize and this is why I drew my little diagram that we have to be able to talk with the people who are attracted by this one that we share something yes we do share something about the value of being protected I'm not talking about flexi security everybody talk in France we are all saying if only we were Dain of course with the sun now everyone is going to say friends to have flexi security and sun second point I have a very long list but I'm sure you can increase it the other thing is of course that this has some characteristic of being local and we have been obsessed during the time of the modernist parenthesis by the distinction between the universal local so if someone says I found a new way to farm in a way which is not the destruction of the environment which doesn't obey what I'm not seeing called the plantaceous model of agricultural production immediately people say oh it's local it's just local and then you are sent again to this line and basically having to prove that this is scalable so of course every time someone does anything it's criticized as being just local in this thing so there is something and it's a very interesting gradient here which is to say no no no it should actually be something and here we don't have a word because if I say global the word global has been tried but here I want to use how is word which is the word wordlet world wordling wordling yes well it's not your language either so you won't bother so this is a very interesting work and of course it's the case in many of the people who are working in this direction because wordling has some of the characteristic of the globe it's sense that it's actually sharing interest with many species it's not just located in one little canton of the word like it would be here but it's not a universal element and it's not the word is exactly that and this is why Anna's work is so important it's not scalable it has a different definition of scale and it's something with my students some of them here we are trying to work a lot because it's very complicated to cartography a non scalable space okay so this is another features which would be interesting to describe now I'm not sure that I should go on because I'd like you to work actually now one of them which is important for me now which is linked to the the the sorry this is very important this was lived and real or symbolic if you want doesn't matter this was divided will and lived so this is a great moment bifurcation between objective quality and subjective quality when we were modern we could always say of anyone criticizing modernism either you are silly and it's just a fancy of your imagination or very politely say oh it's interesting let's do some ethnography about it so the two version was in sort of sense you all know if you do Chinese Tai Chi or if you do if you eat only whole rice or something like that or if you go to your diviner you always try to do this little job except now it's not possible so now on Gaia not on the universe but on the fuses on this little little skin there you have something which is difficult to describe which is realistic I don't know how even to do it realistic objective let's try that multiplicity which means that the power of dismissing a position because you use this real lived actually is a losing ground and to re-ground this is a word which I like which Alexandra was here told me to use is re-grounding is actually the word which would use here okay and we can go on and on and I hope we will do it in the discussion so conclusion now I needed actually a much bigger I'm worried that I erased these things and then you forget about my point and then you will say where are we going because it's a lecture about the future and I erase it so it doesn't work I put it here the third attractor I put it here because it has a strange and of course I'm playing with geometry here and mythology as well but it has the nice features that it's down here during the modernist history we were actually looking for decollage and de-grounding and here we are re-grounding but of course we don't want to land here even though the whole of Europe and most of the world is actually trying to land here because if you followed me they know the globe is not actually something which has any existence all STS people knew that from the beginning we don't live in the rest extensor no scientist live in the rest extensor but we had this idea that the utopia of going to the globe was still feasible now no one believes that I mean no much at least everyone sensed that this massive promise which had been done to all of us that we could modernize the planet will not do for lack of a planet right but where is this planet so strangely the people who are suddenly hearing even though no one actually articulated that clearly everyone who hears that the globe is not the direction where we are going suddenly are asking this strange question where is the planet and we have a sort of uncertainty is it here or is it here and it's not the same figure it's not the same science or at least not the same set of science or the same spirit of science and it certainly not the same politics because those who are interested in going there will have somehow to define I think most of us is somewhere here lots of quotation mark this is us I need to draw that well because this is us we are all lost here and it's unfair to give lectures to orient everybody to say we are lost because now we have three different things where we look and we try out and select what is progressive and what is regressive but now progressive means going this way and regressive might be two different things going this way or going this way and alliances are possible see the great danger and here I'm talking in a discipline I don't know which is political science is that the great danger is that if you accuse all those movements to be simply reactionary populist and neo-fascist you won't talk to them you would just and it's very striking is that every single time people in the New York Times say Trump lied people say it's completely out of the question this is not a question of lying it's not a question of having a political position it's not a question of platform it's a question of what in France we say soft keeper soft keeper well I don't know the words in English I mean it means this is gone you are not telling us let's get there yes yes I know I'm finished so the reason why I put it here is because it's below we have to learn to land and of course it's very complicated to land because we are still trying to get into this horizon and there are many different figures for that but the one I was interested in introducing to you was the milestone that two of my students from SPEEP have actually doing a play on that milestone because it's amazing that the guy who has taken a milestone is actually quite enough and suddenly very alert and detect the difference between what sings and what floats I hope I have shown some of things that float thank you very much thank you Bruno, yes please take a seat and please take off your coat the future is warm this has been wonderful and I'm going to do a live comedy called paddling now for a couple of minutes while the stage is being rearranged I think this gives a lot of opportunity now to actually get to what this whole lecture series was about namely the futures I love that your statement that we are so poor at identifying or thinking of alternative futures and this is where we are now in a moment where we no longer inscribe into this space-time of cartography and chronology where things go from the archaic to the modern but there's another opportunity Gaia is, I think you've called it the true other, our true other this thing that we cannot know and the part of the reason why we cannot know this other is because the we that seeks to know it is a we in search of itself I think you've called it that the we that we used to imagine the land through was a we that was delusioned I suppose had a false consciousness of oppositions between them and us between human and non-human and what happens if one tears that apart I think so the relationship between I think the remaking of the humanities as a way of thinking differently about the world is actually also a different form of future thinking I suppose I thought we could call it the third attractor lecture series from here on I don't know what you want to that's a good idea, futures will do for the moment I'm so happy to be able to perhaps continue what you've called the work of diplomacy here and I'm pleased that to have such to such to imminent diplomat here on on stage with me one is Isabel Stengas, Professor Isabel Stengas and Professor Andreas Robstoff they will be what one might call in charge of affairs I think the French is charge d'affaires diplomats who will take the first step in trying to do that work of diplomacy which is avoiding destruction at the hands of imagined differences and I think you've given us some of the problems in imagined differences before how to avoid war I suppose is the work of diplomacy and if I can introduce you to them none of them need introduction for different reasons but Isabel Stengas or Isabel Stengas depending on where you come from is professor at the department of philosophy and ethics at the Université Libre in Brussels she has a background in chemistry and has for decades worked to promote a politically critical science of critical zones I suppose one could call them a kind of science that transcends the borders of natural and human sciences another science she has insisted for a long time is possible and this insistence goes way back way back to 1984 when she co-wrote the book Order Out of Chaos with Nobel Prize recipient Ilya Prigoshin Isabel Stengas is also an honorary doctor of Olds University from 2012 I believe I think and she gave the keynote a really interesting keynote lecture at the Danish STS conference earlier today and I'm so grateful that that Dasz wants to lend Isabel Stengas to us and that you are able to be here today in a busy schedule of conferencing Andres Robstof holds a joint professorship in the faculty with the faculty of arts and the faculty of health at Olds University he has a double degree very appropriate for this talk in anthropology and in biology he is the director of the Interacting Mind Center a research institute that tries to combine natural research natural science experimentation but also other forms of experimentation with human science critical reflection he has been awarded several honors including just last year the Karlsberg Foundation Research Award he studied nationalism in Lithuania halibuts in Greenland those flatfish and a science lab in London play suitably funded by Lego he's also followed the work of Bruno Latour longer than anyone I know and to start off the debate and I really hope there will be time and I know there will be an hour left so there will be time for questions also from the floor in about half an hour or so if you agree and can I start with you Andres you have called Bruno Latour the James Bond of science studies maybe that's a good place to start but probably not just the James Bond of science studies remember what James Bond is it's a 007 there is a license to do something that many other people are doing it's kind of going in and putting small devices in that just explodes the world so that it looks really differently from before I think this was how I first experienced reading Latour many years ago and I thought this was also what we saw today but I think there is kind of a democratic sense to it and kind of going in himself and blowing up stuff I think where it has been really important is there is also like a licensing to others as well at least that's how we usually teach it that kind of in the hands in the hands of or with the blessings of Latour we all become 00 agents who can go out and kind of map our territories in ways that it could not be done beforehand and that kind of feeling of where should we look for agency it can be in people, it can be in door stoppers it can be in things, it can be in animals has opened up a really important territory so my first question to you what would Latour be is it so that what we really need in the world today are more special agents rather than diplomats or generals I'm lost with your metaphor of a special agent I was already lost with the amyroid and now I'm completely lost I should have said total who is sending the agent what's the authority I'm not sure I understood the question I guess the question is to these days we don't really know who is sending the agent but there seems to be agents fighting for some courses it used to be the country or the globalization but what we need today is that agents fighting for the earth instead I think the military the metaphor of spying doesn't work very well in this situation what I'm interested in for example take one of the we don't have the image anymore but if we go on sorting out this quasi-dilectic order the notion of agency was limited in the middle period which is the modernist things where agency was supposed to be for humans everyone in the social sciences but if you were adding agency to non-humans in chemistry or in biology you immediately shifted to a sort of parascientific or pre-scientific sort of illusion and now I think it's very interesting to work with scientists and activists who are multiplying agencies in ways where immediately they are not split into agency as representation and agency as objective so to speak so the word agency has actually shifted in part for my work but not only for the work of anthropologist to describe also ontological features of word and I think that's what changed so I've lost the metaphor of 007 which never struck me as a very intelligent political mind but a good kidder but I don't think I sympathize with that but what is really interesting is that agency can now describe in a very different ways and we were discussing with you about witchcraft a subject of great interest to Isabella on earth that is on Gaia on this little ring of critical zone it's much more difficult now to dismiss preemptively someone you just subjectively in your head so now the multiple ontology so to speak could become acceptable and that's where diplomacy count so the metaphor of diplomacy is strong the metaphor of spying not so I mean it's more difficult for me to respond to the greatness of besides James Bond is 007 is and they are going to disappear anyway because they go to the Brexit so no one will pay any attention to them anymore there will be no further 009 film that would be my view Isabelle what is your most burning question to the tour? okay well I love to criticize or say it's not enough but today it's more difficult than usual I think there has been a jump in concreteness you know today it's an event to my mind so I will try anyway it seems to me that well I saw the shade of what could be a danger it is not in your talk but in the way it could be relayed and we are living in a dangerous world where very often the stronger relaying agency is the worst we take the more dangerous part and even activate danger where it was not meant to be dangerous and it is this difference between the made up land pseudo identities and earthly ones of the third the third pole it could be used in terms as a terms of judgment this is made up identities so go back to so it seems to me that what we deal with with some activists and here I would speak about the witches from which from whom I learned so much I would call them resurgent identity it's not back to the past it is experimenting with and trying to go on and to reactivate things of the past which has been destroyed so it's more I would say reinvention in a completely different context and I think there must be a lot of precaution in front of the idea of made up identity it's what I find very very compulsive in contrast is this idea I would call generativity of fuses you may make the difference between made up identities protecting against outside danger and resurgent identity through the kind of generativity with which they experiment so that's a proposition and an addition would be maybe what is more disturbing with saying goodbye to scalability to it should be warranted to work at any scale and with any people anonymous people any teacher we have to give the rule of teaching which are good for any teacher in front of any children and all that is that it means saying goodbye to scalability means a measure of accepting the risk and trusting the capacity of learning locally and it means that there is no ready made solution which would evacuate the question and I think that saying goodbye to scalability and all the warrants that it will work at any scale it's a version of what Arawe tells us about learning to stay with the trouble and I think that those earthly this earthly third pole is meant to have staying with the trouble even if we are grasping the barrel the story is not over well he succeeds since he wrote the story but not sure he will be able to write the story but it's not interesting do you want to respond can I ask her a question yeah why not on the first point I agree on Tali of course on the second point I want to understand because the test which I try to make with these three things is always to remember what's lost again every time you say so I didn't understand what would be lost by losing scalability but in fact I think that there may be a third version of the idea of protection when public order is concerned or when what rational is concerned it usually means we must produce device programs which will be protected against the stupidity against the self-centeredness of people normal people are not to be trusted they will abuse so we must produce things which are protected against that and the measure of trust is we have to trust people but the condition which produce both the trust and all that but the point is that we have to leave away the protection of scalability it works whatever the people on the first point I think is very important that one way of getting some of the poisons so to speak of the ecology is precisely that the third attractor is certainly reinvented as well so of course it's not moving because that would be a re-archaization it's not moving from sort of and it's very clear when you study the politics of park and you must have the same here where in France the park actually made a lot of humans as well the national park and one of them has no human in it so of course the whole question of wilderness which is a cliche of history of science as well as STS would share a need that's where we need a sort of chivalret to describe the well made identity for the sort of badly made identity we knew that but I think it complicate and use the question when you have three ways of making these identity so it's not the same if you invent a saucisson which would be a local saucisson which would be exactly the same as the other saucisson except it would be a local saucisson it's a big issue in France with the what is called the protected name of things and I think you have also some of those here in Denmark so every single of this reattachment to this free pole has a different definition of what it is to invent identity and we should try to fine tune to be able to differentiate because every day, every time we read the paper we do actually this selection between what seems to go this way, this way or this way the problem is that it's very difficult to have a political position which is arguable if you don't define the land the soil on which this the horizon on which this is going and the ecologists did as if we already knew something about the earth and what is so striking in the work of the new natural historian as you would say and the group of Anna would say is that we certainly realize how different the land the earth is from the globe and it's not even seen, we try with some of our students then in the exhibition in Kant's to make the distinction between 2D and 3D so one of the work of art is by Pierre Huiguer with a French artist and he says it's called Giverny Translated and it is actually an impression his painting because he took the soil from Giverny of Monet except it's an aquarium with lots of fish in it that you see but sometimes you see nothing so it's actually built a 3D view of a fragile sometime invisible ecosystem and then you measure the distance between impressionism and 2016 art form it's one of this many ways in which you can begin to feel that landing down is not at all the same thing as the sort of for example the vanguard history of art yes and it's something which I think is so very important because the modernization front very often produced the idea that well some things are destroyed but what has been destroyed can be recomposed if you can do it you can make it un-make it and all that and there is different what Gilles Deleuze the philosopher calls difference de nature between destroying disentangling and reproducing new entanglement regenerating I think one you can destroy without even knowing it Galileo when we disentangled one motion the one from which you would be able to learn and to tell from the others he had no impression of destroying anything was just purifying analyzing but in order to regenerate or reactivate entanglement and generativity coming from entanglement you have to practice art of paying attention noticing not imposing your goodwill not trusting goodwill negotiating with not submissive force being ready to surprise learning and it's something which to me is very important it's that this term learning learning with learning from and all that it's one of the words less used in philosophy only lame needs spoke about learning but who did lame needs but can't you don't learn anything everything is your head and all that no learning is absent so I thought maybe if we go with this very beautiful metaphor of the third attractor of the earth as a non scalable realistic objective multiplicity now what I would like to hear your both opinion on is now what do we do with time what do we do with the past in terms of the agency because we can say from the global perspective or from the local perspective from the land the past is everything from the global perspective traditionally the past is absolutely nothing but it seems that neither everything nor nothing is really capturing the importance of pasts for experimenting with the kind of presence that we live in in the current moment so how do we deal then with the past from this third attractor of the earth this non scalable realistic objective multiplicity well we now a free past the past past the past of the modernist future which has absolutely no relation whatsoever with the first past every anthropologist know that but when you try to imagine what where the people were not modern they were of course not archaic I mean this is a cliche of anthropology since at least and the new past past past I don't want to say that would be something where precisely so past in the sense that simultaneously you would have if you take agriculture now people who are disputing the model of agriculture in France they would say if we resist the gigantic farm with thousand pig we are not going to the other past a casing farm we are inventing a non scalable non plantation type of things and we of course invent lots of things about Brittany and invented tradition about Brittany because this is what happened in Brittany and we try to find a way but precisely the way was not found because it's a very clear case the only thing that the French agriculture ministries told these guys were on strike do like the Danes and modernize yourself because now as I said the Danes is sort of the hill the city on the hill now the new city on the hill and this is completely a poison for the people because what do you do when you are said have thousands of thousands and every single other way is archaized so it's very important to be able to say I mean if there is one notion which is infected by the modernizing front is the word past so and it's immediately when I say that immediately I hear ah you want to go back to the past you are a reactionary which of course I am a reactionary but the question is to what you react and where you move and as long as we have this only vector a reactionary is always easy to detect because the reactionary is going there but what if you are a reactionary going there a reactionary and an activist begin to look different and that's what I am trying to articulate and of course agriculture is an ideal case because it's where everybody is I was on a farm recently and there are people who are talking about a post-modern hedge there was the old hedge which had been cut then there was post-modern hedge or high-tech hedge with dozens of new things but I would like to hear how Isabelle will answer well I will give I time is a very complicated thing so I will protect myself behind a philosopher which is my the one who is more important for me which is who is whited for whited the past is what we have to inherit one way or another whatever we do in the present is inheriting the past but what matters what is to be thought is how we inherit it there is no conformity or there is no freedom from how the manner in which we inherit is invention whatever the past we inherited true invention but how do we honor the invention or do we present it as disqualification or as conformity this is a question of cultivating cultivating the idea of inheriting the past with a question but innovation and cultivation would that be the same because it seems that the innovation will immediately pull us towards this attractor so is it a cultivation rather than innovation is that the metaphor let's say that for whited whatever we do we innovate one way or another but we can innovate through disqualifying this is modern this is rupture we have nothing to learn from the past we are out of it yes thank you but we can honor the question of how to inherit it open the question and honor it give it importance and this would be cultivation my chief job today is to dump everything down a little bit and if I could do that by asking you to be a little bit more concrete about what Gaia is because if the whole problem is that we are strong out between these infernal alternatives between the globe and the land that is full of problems too politically and analytically and existentially then what Gaia seems to me to be really important and you've been multiplying words in order to describe it Gaia and Gaia etc I was wondering if is there any way to be a little bit more concrete and just as a warm up maybe you mentioned in one of your texts that the best example you could think of for Gaia comes out of a last fontria movie melancholia where I realized there are two globes so it's a problem but there's the planet of melancholia that swallows up the earth the ending scene the movie has been described both as an artsy film about the apocalypse but it's also been described as a psychological drama about depression it seems to me that Gaia is the possibility of thinking Gaia is both a result of a history of ecological disaster but also is it also a zeitgeist? is there like a moment in which it is now possible to think Gaia that was not possible in the 80s when globalization seemed to work I mean this wouldn't require a long time and Isabelle has managed to say about it my version of Gaia is that it's sort of layers and layers and layers of different things starting with the name suggested to if you call it earth system science you have a completely different set of associations if you talk it like the earth you have another one if you talk of Gaia as a new age goddess you still have another one so I think we have to accept the idea that Gaia is all of these things layered and it gives another entry and gives you a simple answer is that now I'm in the habit when I talk to geochemist geopolitician etc to ask are you a Gaia chemist or Gaia guaffe or Gaia politician etc and the single simple difference between these two words which are exactly the same in Greek makes a nice shift because everything which was stabilized and simplified in geography which means the background and foreground on the background is perturbated so whatever Gaia is it's a redistribution of the agencies of foreground background and this is why I did a play on Gaia because precisely this is ideal for a play I mean this is also a bit of a play it was the most complicated play because it's exactly the sort of thing you can approach from mythology from science system science etc etc but it directs attention so of course the fact that it's new and arrives is probably part of the giant guys but we should not forget that this is from the 60s so it is a sort of belated giant guys and the way I use it is it's up for grabs I mean Gaia is up for grabs but it's not nature and that's a central point and it's not creation which is another very important point for theology maybe this is a good time to bring in the audience what is strange just to add is that no nature but Jesus was nature before Galileo kidnapped one kind of motion and forget about all the rest and what Isabel says before something very important is that what Galileo did you cannot redo it by adding the lived word on top of Galileo and if there is a giant guys from my understanding of what the natural science are doing now it's exactly that but it's not adding life on the movement in a sort of superficial remediation there is no way to remediate but there is a new entanglement and this is why the word of Gaia like most is multi-folded which is by the way an old term of mythology the multi-folded Gaia is actually a Greek epithet obviously and if I may add just I think what we have to get out also is analytic view holism because Gaia is not a figure of holism because there is no unifying point of view even internal multi-folded means there is indeed no good point of view from which to understand even internal not from nowhere but Gaia is not scalable yes not scalable neither the whole but at each scale it's complicated I think we should take a question from the floor hello okay thank you all of you I have a very quick question I wonder if the point of view that the four of you have been discussing isn't quite Eurocentric or perhaps European and North American centric and I wonder if how these dichotomies you're discussing and what they mean to us would look differently from a Chinese or Indian or Arab point of view especially as they've become much more wealthy and much more politically powerful in one lifetime while a lot of the anxieties behind what you're discussing is the lack of a comparative wealth and political power for Europeans and North Americans thank you my talk is unabashedly Eurocentric because that's where the prime comes from so and then it has been extended of course but the difficulty of meeting other collectives when you are a modernist is the prime nowadays and that's why I call the exhibition in castle reset modernity using the metaphor reset which has its own difficulty so it is it's very important to be Eurocentric so that you can actually extract the poison which makes absolutely impossible to consider positively in terms of multiple agency the alternative world which have inhibited also for another reason which is that which is very beautifully illustrated in a book by a young anthropologist called Nastasia Martin who studied a nation in south sorry east north of Alaska which is called Les Ames Sauvages I hope it will be translated in English it's very for me in the same league as because it's exactly the prime of the difficulty of the ecologist of the missionary of the administrators to understand anything about what it is to live in the ruins of occidentalization and it's exactly the prime why I think the whole project my project on inquiring to mode of existence is again completely Eurocentric because that's where the difficulty of just registering the other way to inhabit the world it never cut ice because constantly they are pushed to the first attractor all those nice way of living in the past all this etc so the bon sauvage argument is built in that and as long as we don't say okay we share the same situation of course as you said very like much more dramatically you and us that now have the same whirlwind the same might storm under our feet and we can enter into a collaboration in anthropology and I think you would agree with that which would be unthinkable before I mean you lose your ground we are beginning to lose our ground as well how do you do how do you do is not the same thing as as before before how do you do with Dr. Livingstone I presume but now it would be ah you lose ground we are losing ground as well and how do we cope so coping to use again an argument about ruins is I think something which establish and I think precisely the dispute about is it also intrigue or not it's completely understandable by people it's time to put some order in your own house that's my project in anthropology of a modern I think Gaia is also the place to do that I think you have collaborated with the Castro and Deborah Dunn yes but we all agree with this gentleman that Gaia is a typically Eurocentric figure and I think it's true but that's precisely why I find interesting it's the peace gesture if we arrive and say ah we live in Gaia we have one little chance of being understood by people who don't live in Gaia because we have no idea about nature and all these things and we have ignored it all together but at least we can begin if we tell them ah you live on earth on the globe and we are now sunk into the same globalization movement they say well you don't understand earth I mean I don't know if it answers but this is the link yeah thank you very much for a fascinating lecture and discussion I would like to insist perhaps we iterate the question of concreteness I think there were a lot of very exciting and interesting concepts some of which we know some of which we might not be very familiar with but you know entanglement multiplicity of agency generativity those are things that have been around a while and so I would very much like to ask you maybe the three panelists to briefly try to connect try to commit yourself to maybe a practice and as the field of the exercise I would want to know more about the question of digital culture and especially the question of digital humanities so what can you think of as concrete practices maybe of research maybe of teaching for us that you think at the moment right here and now would help us to multiply agencies would help us to entangle disentangle complicate agencies to I would like you to fill those very abstract and dare I say academic cliches with some concreteness well I'd like to know what is on your own page did you do my little exercise of selecting the three things on attractor one attractor two and attractor three okay go ahead I think you'd like to have the answer yourself so I think it's better you to say one of course is precisely the question of digital culture say what was your answer what what was your answer to that my my answer is I mean the question is how do we place ourselves in terms of digital culture in terms of digital humanities because because from the perspective of people in academia it of course is on the one hand it's a threat it's a tool of disciplining academia and disciplining the humanities on the other hand it might very well have opportunities which I'm perhaps not aware of so I think rather than playing the game of insisting and I understand that it's a very good purpose for it but insisting so to speak on remaining abstract I would like to throw also the question back at you and say where as an activist in which kind of farm in Brittany have you encountered practices which you think at the moment in that concrete situation had what might also call have agonistic potential or were constellations that at the moment of course allowed for another place for Gaia to emerge however briefly I think you should answer those they are to the whole panel my connection with digital humanities well known I think and I've done a lot of it so I don't think I need to answer that can I try to answer for you or at least see if you wanted to go that way that it seems to me that analysis is your form of practice that practice you have this wonderful where you say that it's time to invert the 11th thesis on firebuck where once upon a time with Marx we should stop interpreting the world and start changing it it seems to me that you are saying we should stop trying to change the world and start interpreting it in a particular way that for that reason your diagramming your cartooning becomes a form of practice actually a form of politics would you agree yeah well I think I would be undiplomatic and say that abstraction is usually by people who have in their head even more simplified an abstract concept so the accusation against academic talk on that score don't cut any ice with me because it's exactly the opposite is that we in this situation which is witnessing half of the world going back to identity politics are I think largely limited by the numbers of concept we can simultaneously entertain and the fact of being able to entertain only two poles doesn't seem to be very good so work by academic for academic using not abstraction but speculative concept and figure is our duty and if people find that abstract so bad for them I don't give a damn it was not a more diplomatic thing but sometimes diplomacies say I won't discuss that silly question well of course I mean commit into a practice being a researcher means I guess doing research but what strikes to me here is that in a way we have been exploring also metaphors of not just being in the world but also seeing the world the primary ones being either there is a world a view from the outside as in globalization or as a view from within as in the local perspective it seems that maybe what the earth perspective is about what a lot of research what a lot of practices should be about now is trying to understand what does it mean to take a perspective from between whatever that is in other words if you look at the earth it's really interesting grabbing a piece of earth or a hand of earth in your hands it's kind of the betweenness of it it's relations it's potentials for perspectives that seems to define that kind of materiality and maybe these are some of the research practices that one could be looking at not so much either the phenomenological from within or the classical scientific from the outside but trying to develop kind of a language for what is it like to take a perspective from between and how that translates to digital humanities I have no clue at all but I think it's mostly a question of description we are very bad at describing the situation as this gentleman were rightly requesting I mean it's very striking to see a whole industry of agriculture completely paralyzed by this idea that there is only one vector which is modernization and every time sort of bio things bio-agricultures come in to be cornered into the local the small the non-scalable and the archaic and trying to fight out of that so of course there are many very important things to do practically that it's the role of intellectual especially French intellectual which are known for their abstraction to the small layer of things it's small I mean it's very small very impalpable which is what when we are paralyzed by a poisonous concept modernization is a poisonous concept and it's the duty of those who have been infected to try to extract it so that other concrete I don't know what it means but concrete situation are actually give a sort of a leeway because if you paralyze them by saying modernize your farm and go from 100 pigs to a thousand where would you where do you lead these people and every single word is actually leading in that and people should never criticize concept as abstract because we play such an important role there was a debate in Denmark a couple of weeks ago the national ethics committee yes there is such a thing in this country suggested that one should that the state should impose taxes on meat as a way of reducing methane emissions and the counter argument I remember was that if you raise taxes on meat making it more expensive to buy it that would mean that the poor section of the population would not be able to eat meat so the argument that defeated reducing methane was that we actually it's a social justice issue we should not do this because it would be socially unjust and it strikes me that that is the kind of I think you call them infernal alternatives Isabel that they are the possibility of either continuing to emit methane into the atmosphere or social unrest because people don't eat meat that seems to be of that same kind of logic of if you're not over here then you're back here but I think there is an argument here that should we not only describe it should we not also do something what would be your should we eat more meat or less no I think that just as William James I think that ideas abstraction do matter you have just to take care of your abstractions and William James question which I say which is not an answerable question but a matter of concern was when you add such such ideas do you add do you elevate the value of the real or do you diminish it so it's not a question you can answer because you cannot measure the value and all that but it is a concern which is a bit like Leibniz tell why here don't give general reasons but in this situation what do you add or what do you subtract and it seems to me that I don't know but it seems to me that the point is also to take into account what is already going on since it was a I don't know a lot about digital humanities what I know is that all those activist research about producing in another way food and all that all that would not have been possible without the web it is there that they acquire they know how discuss produce and meet between them and learn from the failure and the attempt before so I think that it's if there is a digital humanities it's going on and it's going on through the end of amateur connoisseurship learning to do together to reclaim together a thing which have been forgotten and which come back new should we try a question over here ah sorry I'm sorry well actually he was ahead of me just very quickly I was getting a little bit confused about the globalization issue I mean I've been going back a lot lately to Teilhard de Chardin and the concept of the noosphere and if I look at lots of the rhetoric about the internet of things and smart cities it is a globalizing rhetoric but it's a globalizing rhetoric which has I think a great richness to it Bruno especially you are polarizing the kind of global is bad back to the land is bad Gaia is good but for me there is a globalization around that sort of vision which is actually a rich and interesting one which is giving agency which is really dealing with distributed agencies in ways that act of network theory has been talking about for the longest time oh yes the third attractor has cities in it it's not a countryside I should have said and big cities and cities which are actually actively selected by thousands and thousands of architect activists and critique of what the future of the city will be so of course you are perfectly right but we have the same exactly the same question in architecture and actually I'm discussing next week with Philippe Hamer who is one of the most original redistributor of features of the city and we could have talked about that in more concrete so don't in spite of what I said and that's the danger of using the word Gaia it's not a nice countryside it is highly active with lots of web for prime is to select inside the many many hyped about the future of the digital cities how you select those three set of values which could help you to decide where you want to live and there are many cities connected hyped city where I don't want to live so the selection mechanism is exactly the same but you write to thank you for allowing me to say that Gaia is not a countryside yes it's made of big cities but these cities have to be selected detail by detail and what is so interesting in discussing with architect precisely the selection is extremely fine it goes in every single details of what the city is about and it's extension architect is in way the concrete discipline of what I was telling before also for one simple reason is that cities are one of the most active politically in the climate discussion and the network of city does a lot of interesting innovation as well should we take another one from over this side this arrow you drew with globe on one side and the land on the other and the choice of going one way or the other I'm just trying for myself to figure out how to deal with this because I've been rather interested in Jeffrey Herf's book about reactionary modernism and if you look in the Oxford English dictionary the first reference to globalism is Adolf Hitler and of course we all know Charlie Chaplin's dance with the globe and at the same time they were also the great people for land and since we've been talking about Danish agricultural policy our present government is the farmer's party and they are going in for intelligent agriculture which means agribusiness, globalized and at the same time they're the most reactionary party to take the silver from the refugees so it seems to me that the global in a way the local is a creature of the global and vice versa so somehow rather this new way of thinking has to get out of that somehow that's exactly what I called the third attractor that you did more than anyone else to show that exactly that the local is the local of the global so of course this is polarity which is born in the same way the question is to shift the compass in the other way requires not to reuse the local and the global and this is why I think it was useful for us to do this little exercise and I say the local of the third category has nothing to do with the local of the third and it's not a dialectic mechanism and the case you mentioned is really interesting because in history agriculture has been used massively by reactionary party and especially in France of course so yes the difficulty is to again select Jeff's question was how do you select in the hype about the city and here's how do you select in the reactionary themselves they themselves have to be sort of selected layers by layers but to be selecting you need a selecting mechanism you need a titration of some sort a compass and that's what I was trying to do if not you're always held up because people will say we are for the future of agriculture and agriculture resonate which is one of the oxymor we use in France often we are oh yes oh great agriculture you want to resonate agriculture that's fabulous I have a little ethnographic observation if you want it when I read we've never been modern from 93 it seemed to me at least that modernity as you described it there was never ending it may be that we moderns were systematically misunderstanding ourselves but it was a system that seemed to cope pretty well with its own contradictions and internal inconsistencies it seems that in your later work modernity is already it's kind of already tilted there's a modernity is no longer what it used to be or what it never was there's a kind of a the possibility of a third attractor is kind of in the wobbliness of the whole axis there you've drawn it kind of as a slanty thing it's amusing you say that because in the ZKM show we have asked territorial agency or group of architect to bring in what we call the Museum of Oil and it's made of gigantic maps of land crab of oil industry in five different countries it's really big and very precise but they tilted it by 15 degrees so when you are looking when you are visiting this part of the show you immediately imagine that whole thing is going to fall on you and it's called the Museum of Oil because it's supposed to be what would be in the future pounds bringing their kids looking at our period as a very strange and silly period but of course you don't know where it is in the future is it in the future actually the future would be the same so it's one of this thing the gestures you did is exactly this sort of mixture of figure, art form and concept which is my way of moving in this zeitgeist that's why exhibition is so magnificent as a media form can we take another question from Peter perhaps Uleg up here thank you and thank you for a very stimulating talk I have kind of a comment and a question the thing is of course this whole idea of the archaic and the future and this kind of modernization idea would you say also, I mean from a point of view of situatedness well we all impose archaism and futures all the time so it's not really like it becomes substantiated as a very particular event in any case so we all kind of although you're just to leave this kind of model it seems like to be a very universal model anyway but not universal in the sense that it's one we share because we always kind of make our own kind of archaism and futures so I mean for me for instance I would consider Trump to be a very archaic figure right although for others he might be a futurist so that's kind of a way of maybe questioning the ideas of the model in that sense and then secondly and that's my question is would you say that the problem really is that the idea of the attractor that maybe the problem is that Gaia isn't able to be an attractor in fact is the very problem that Gaia doesn't seem to gather us or to summon us to the task at hand so I mean to stay with your thinking about the collective in that respect yeah I mean this is an interesting well first of the commentary because I think on the contrary everything is contrary and I think I learned that from anthropologist that there is no archaic people that there is no archaic reactionary either they are always reinventing and we all remember the mistake which was made in the 1930 when we said this is the archaic coming back no no it was completely new and it was very strong so we should not say Trump I think it would be a mistake to say Trump Trump is contrary and inventive and it's not something a resurgence of the past it's unfortunately something which is neo-invented just as much as the activist world in which we need to live if we want to survive now on the unattractiveness of Gaia I think this is the key issue which is and I have many ways to enter into it but the one I did it in the Gifford and now in facing Gaia is the theological origin of that why is it that for people who have been in the tradition of Christianity and they say the western this in deference to whatever could be called the old natural world and there is a series of theological argument which could be made about that so it's not that one of them which I think is alluded to in nature in this sector is that it is linked I think to this idea that whenever we talk about Gaia it's about the lived the lived world and we have not been able to reabsorb as much of the sciences of Gaia and the mistake on Lovelock for me is really interesting as soon as he uttered this argument about the connectedness but not the holistic but the entanglement of the life form it was immediately shifted to a very traditional definition of one organism and a sort of traditional neo-mixtures of things I mean horrible view really so and that's also what happened to the ecology movement my question is why it is the same as yours and I have no answer to that why is it that what we live in it's as if we were not on Earth we modern are not on Earth so this is why the news coming to us about climate, soil, fish etc were yeah it's interesting but it doesn't concern us because we are not on Earth and that's this gentleman say I was abstract but we are all more abstract because being abstract mean we are not of this world and there are a lot of theological arguments complex and I have no time to get into it my impression of the perfect quietism with which we hear about all this news about ecology is that we are not of this world it doesn't concern us we are somewhere else and we are in another place that's the only explanation I have it's not a good one and that's why it's so difficult to re-land, to re-ground where would we be if we were re-ground? we cannot re-ground in the right extensor which is supposedly the reductionist view that scientists give us which is not true of course but where would you be if you were in the right extensor you would be in the complete utopia an idealist version of matter so the difficulty of being materialist is I think the key thing and here I should cite because I have not talked about it Pope Francis on cyclical uncyclical because the originality of this uncyclical is precisely to say re-ground you question re-ground, not look here look down and the looking down with this very important link between poverty inequality and ecology in my view the first really efficient gesture by an authority about what it would mean to re-ground but apart from that I never heard anyone saying this concern, no it's not concern it's about nature no one lives in nature the moon is in nature the sun is in nature, not us so what happens on nature doesn't concern us it's as simple as that there is an entire discussion about the resurgence of religion in contemporary thinking and time that we do not have time for in fact we're out of time so all of you who have questions I'm sorry we'll have to end here in hopefully a not too depressing place I would like you to put your hands together for Isabelle Stengers for Andreas Röpstof and in particular for Bruno Latour hands and every cloud has a silver lining it's been too hot today I'm so sorry I hate people who say that when the weather is warm it's global warming but I nevertheless have something here that is perhaps a sign a sign of things to come I knew you were doing this Denmark is growing wine at the northern limits of possibility I don't want it I don't want even to hear about it because Denmark is the new French it's the new Bogonia and I've given you here it's won many prizes and also for you and typically of Danish products it has a map of Denmark on the front just so that you're not in doubt about where it's from this is a most depressing gift I have a gift there is actually wine from France if you want a glass to cool down after this hot afternoon thank you so much for coming