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The 12th International
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ISSEI |
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International Society for the Study
of European Ideas |
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Section IV: Literature, Art, Music, Theatre, Culture
and
Section
V: Religion, Philosophy, Anthropology, Psychology, Language
Workshop: Humans and Nonhumans Entangled: Risky Attachments between Art
and Science
Chairs:
Angela Cozea and Colin MacPherson
In his book Politics
of Nature, Bruno Latour proposes that political
ecology is the discipline most able, nowadays, to move the role of unifier of
all beings out of the dual arena of nature and politics and into the single arena of the collective. He
affirms that political ecology does this in practice, “when it jointly forbids
both the natural order and the social order to categorize in a definitive and
separate way what counts and what does not, what is connected and what must remain
detached”. In order to characterise political ecology not by way of a crisis of
nature, but by way of a crisis of objectivity, Latour
makes the distinction between risk-free objects, the smooth objects to which we
had been accustomed up to now, and those they are giving way to : risky attachments, tangled objects.
Matters of fact, that is, risk free objects, had four
essential characteristics that made it possible to recognize them at a glance:
the object produced had clear boundaries; those who produced it became invisible,
once the object was finished; this “risk-free object” brought some unexpected
consequences conceived in the form of an impact on a different universe and
designated by expressions like “social factors,” “political dimensions,”
“irrational aspects;” these unexpected consequences never had an impact on the initial definition of the
object, since they belonged to the world of unpredictable history.
In addition to smooth objects, we are called today to
recognize the proliferation of matters of concern: they have no clear
boundaries and therefore take on the aspect of tangled beings, forming rhizomes
and networks; their scientific, technological, and industrial production has
been an integral part of their definition from the beginning; these
quasi-objects have no impact, but rather they have connections; they can no longer be detached from the
unexpected consequences that they will not fail to produce – consequences for
which they accept responsibility, from which they draw lessons.
For Latour, the most
sophisticated of the human sciences have also long since abandoned the notion
of nature, by showing that we never have immediate access to “nature in
general”; humans only gain access, according to the historians, the
psychologists, the sociologists, and the anthropologists, through the mediation
of history, of culture – which are specifically social and mental categories.
By asserting that the expression “nature in general”
has no meaning, Latour seems to be reconnecting with
the good sense of human sciences. In what the relationship between nature and
the sciences is concerned, he proposes the following model: we would not be
dealing with a society “threatened” by recourse to an objective nature, but
with a collective in the process of expanding,
where the properties of human beings and nonhumans are in no way assured; we do
not need a dramatic and mysterious “conversion” to search for new nonhumans:
the small transformations carried out by scientific disciplines are entirely
sufficient; there is indeed an objective external reality, but this particular
externality is not definitive, since the new nonhumans find themselves
mobilised, socialised, domesticated; the newly recruited nonhumans show up to
enrich the collective, they are here to complicate and open up our discussions.
With Latour, and keeping in
mind the virtues of other forms of representation – the arts, psychoanalysis,
philosophy - than those aforementioned, we want to ask two kindred questions:
What would the entities he calls nonhumans
look like if they were not understood as matters of fact seeking to conquer
subjectivities? What would humans look like if they no longer behaved like
partisans resisting the tyranny of objectivity? Does literature, for instance,
do other forms of art allow us to know – just like the sciences - that
nonhumans are no longer objects at all, and no longer social constructions,
either?
Since objects are not innocent inhabitants of the world, and since the social world is no more made up of
subjects than nature is made up of objects, can literature help us distinguish
humans from subjects - where the subject
was the human caught up in the polemic of nature and courageously resisting objectivization by Science?
We invite our panellists to reflect on this proposition
according to which the smooth, matter of fact objects, and the world of
unpredictable history where they lived, is a world of the past, brought down
and laid to rest by the matters of concern which make up the rhizomatic world we live in today. We want to consider in
what manner the making sensible of the arts may be equivalent to the making
visible brought about by the mediation of the sciences, starting from nature -
as Latour reminds us, not in order to move toward the
human element, but to move toward the
multiplicity of nature.
Angela Cozea
Professor
of French, Faculty Research Fellow
Jackman Humanities
Institute
To
Colin MacPherson
Psychiatrist
Centre
for Addiction and Mental Health
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