Agency at the Time of the Anthropocene

Author(s): Bruno Latour

Source: New Literary History , WINTER 2014, Vol. 45, No. 1 (WINTER 2014), pp. 1-18
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/24542578

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 Agency at the Time of the Anthropocene
Bruno Latour

Et pourtant la Terre s'émeut

—Michel Serres, Le contrat naturel

news like this one from Le Monde on Tuesday, May 7, 2013:

How are"Atwe
Maunasupposed
Loa, on Friday to
May react when faced
3, the concentration of COs with a piece of
was reaching 399.29 ppm"? How can we absorb the odd novelty of the
headline: 'The amount of C02 in the air is the highest it has been for
more than 2.5 million years—the threshold of 400 ppm of C02, the
main agent of global warming, is going to be crossed this year"? Such an
extension of both the span of deep history and the impact of our own
collective action is made even more troubling by the subtitle in the same
article, which quietly states: 'The maximum permissible COs limit was
crossed just before 1990." So not only do we have to swallow the news
that our very recent development has modified a state of affairs that is
vastly older than the very existence of the human race (a diagram in the
article reminds us that the oldest human tools are comparatively very
recent!), but we have also to absorb the disturbing fact that the drama
has been completed and that the main revolutionary event is behind us,
since we have already crossed a few of the nine "planetary boundaries"
considered by some scientists as the ultimate barrier not to overstep!1
I think that it is easy for us to agree that, in modernism, people are
not equipped with the mental and emotional repertoire to deal with
such a vast scale of events; that they have difficulty submitting to such
a rapid acceleration for which, in addition, they are supposed to feel
responsible while, in the meantime, this call for action has none of the
traits of their older revolutionary dreams. How can we simultaneously
be part of such a long history, have such an important influence, and
yet be so late in realizing what has happened and so utterly impotent
in our attempts to fix it?
What I find amazing in such a piece of news is, first, the number of
scientific disciplines involved in producing the set of figures that the
journalist uses—from climatology to paleontology—and second, the
historical drama in which those sciences are, from now on, so deeply

New Literary History, 2014, 45: 1-18

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 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

entangled. It is impossible to read such a statemen

fact" contemplated coldly from a distant place, as wa
the case, in earlier times, when dealing with "information
the "natural sciences." There is no distant place anym
with distance, objectivity is gone as well, or at least a
objectivity that was unable to take into account the
history. No wonder that climatosceptics are denying th
those "facts" that they now put in scare quotes. In a w
not because all those disciplines are not producing an
resist objections (that's where objectivity really comes fro
the very notion of objectivity has been totally subverted
of humans in the phenomena to be described—and in
tackling them.2
While the older problem of science studies was to under
role of scientists in the construction of facts, a new pr
to understand the active role of human agency not onl
tion of facts, but also in the very existence of the phenom
are trying to document? The many important nuanc
news, stories, alarms, warnings, norms, and duties are
is why it is so important to try to clarify a few of them
when we are trying to understand how we could shift
to ecology, given the old connection between those tw
the "scientific worldview."

At the beginning of the 1990s, just at the time when the dangerous
C02 threshold had been unwittingly crossed, the French philosopher
Michel Serres, in a daring and idiosyncratic book called The Natural
Contract, offered, among many innovative ideas, a fictional reenactment
of Galileo's most famous quote: "Eppur si muove\" In the potted history
of science that we all learned at school, after having been forbidden by
the Holy Inquisition to teach anything publically about the movement
of the Earth, Galileo is supposed to have mumbled "and yet it moves."
This episode is what Serres calls the first trial: a "prophetic" scientist
pitted against all the authorities of the time, stating silently the objec
tive fact that will later destroy these authorities. But now, according to
Serres, we are witnessing a second trial: in front of all the assembled
powers, another scientist—or rather an assembly of equally "prophetic"
scientists—is condemned to remain silent by all those who are in denial
about the behavior of the Earth, and he mumbles the same "Eppur si
muove" by giving it a different and rather terrifying new spin: "andyet the
Earth is moved." (The French is even more telling: "Et pourtant la Terre
se meut' versus "et pourtant la Terre s'émeut"\) Serres writes:

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AGENCY AT THE TIME OF THE ANTHROPOCENE

Science won all the rights three centuries ago now, by appealing t
which responded by moving. So the prophet became king. In our
appealing to an absent authority, when we cry, like Galileo, but befo
of his successors, former prophets turned kings: "the Earth is mo
memorial, fixed Earth, which provided the conditions and founda
lives, is moving, the fundamental Earth is trembling.3

In an academic setting, I don't need to review those new

with which the Earth is now agitated in addition to its usua
Not only does it turn around the Sun (that much we knew
agitated through the highly complex workings of many enmesh
organisms, the whole of which is either called "Earth system sc
more radically, Gaia.4 Gaia, a very ticklish sort of goddess.
ries after the facts of astronomy, facts of geology have become
much so that a piece of information about Charles David Re
at Mauna Loa has shifted from the "science and technology
the newspaper to a new section reserved for the damning t
the Earth.5 We all agree that, far from being a Galilean bod
of any other movements than those of billiard balls, the Ear
taken back all the characteristics of a full-fledged actor. In
pesh Chakrabarty has proposed, it has become once again a
history, or rather, an agent of what I have proposed to call our
geostory.6 The problem for all of us in philosophy, science, or
becomes: how do we tell such a story?
We should not be surprised that a new form of agency—"it is
is just as surprising to the established powers as the old on
moving." If the Inquisition was shocked at the news that th
nothing more than a billiard ball spinning endlessly in the v
(remember the scene where Bertolt Brecht has the monks a
ridicule Galileo's heliocentrism by whirling aimlessly in a r
Vatican),7 the new Inquisition (now economic rather than
shocked to learn that the Earth has become—has become a
tive, local, limited, sensitive, fragile, quaking, and easily tickled
We would need a new Bertolt Brecht to depict how, on talk
on Fox News, so many people (for instance, the Koch brot
physicists, a lot of intellectuals, a great many politicians fr
right, and alas quite a few cardinals and pastors) are now rid
discovery of the new—also very old—agitated and sensitive Eart
point of being in denial about this large body of science.
In order to portray the first new Earth as one falling bo
all the other falling bodies of the universe, Galileo had to p
notions of climate, agitation, and metamorphosis (apart from
discover the second new Earth, climatologists are bringing

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 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

back in and returning the Earth to its sublunar, corru

condition. Galileo's Earth could spin, but it had no "t
no "planetary boundaries." As Michael Hulme has said
means to talk again not about "the weather," but abo
as a new form of discourse.9 The European prescienti
Earth saw it as a cesspool of decay, death, and corrup
our ancestors, their eyes fixed toward the incorruptibl
stars, and God, had a tiny chance of escaping solely t
contemplation, and knowledge; today, in a sort of co
revolution, it is science that is forcing our eyes to turn t
considered, once again, as a cesspool of conflict, deca
and corruption. This time, however, there is no praye
of escaping to anywhere else. After having moved fro
mos to the infinite universe,10 we have to move back
universe to the closed cosmos—except this time ther
God, no hierarchy, no authority, and thus literally no
that means a handsome and well-composed, arrangeme
new situation its Greek name, kakosmos. What a drama
through: from cosmos to the universe and then, from
the kakosmos\ Enough of a move to make us feel que
Mrs. Sarti in Brecht's play.

Even though we have to continue fighting those who

propose that we let them alone for a moment and seize
to advance our common cosmopolitics.11 What I want
paper is what sort of agency this new Earth should b
other insights from Serres will render my goal clearer
passage I quoted, he reverses the distribution of "subje
understood here in their legal sense. ( The Natural Contrac
a piece of legal philosophy.)

For, as of today, the Earth is quaking anew: not because it

its restless, wise orbit, not because it is changing, from its d
velope of air, but because it is being transformed by our doing
reference point for ancient law and for modern science becaus
objectivity in the legal sense, as in the scientific sense, ema
urithout man, which did not depend on us and on which w
and de facto. Yet henceforth it depends so much on us that it
we too are worried by this deviation from expected equilibria.
the Earth and making it quake! Now it has a subject once again

Although the book does not invoke the name of "Gaia" a

before the label "Anthropocene" became so widesprea
it points to the same complete subversion of the respe

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AGENCY AT THE TIME OF THE ANTHROPOCENE

subject and object. Since the scientific revolution, the ob

world without humans had offered a solid ground for a sort
jus naturalism—if not for religion and morality, at least
law. At the time of the counter-Copernican revolution, w
toward the former solid ground of natural law, what do
traces of our action are visible everywhere! And not in
that the Male Western Subject dominated the wild and sa
nature through His courageous, violent, sometimes hubr
control. No, this time we encounter, just as in the old pr
nonmodern myths,13 an agent which gains its name of "s
he or she might be subjected to the vagaries, bad humor,
tions, and even revenge of another agent, who also gains
"subject" because it is also subjected, to his or her action. It is
sense that humans are no longer submitted to the diktat
nature, since what comes to them is also an intensively s
of action. To be a subject is not to act autonomously in
objective background, but to share agency with other subject
lost their autonomy. It is because we are now confronted
jects—or rather c/îta.vi-subject.s—that we have to shift away
of mastery as well as from the threat of being fully natu
without bifurcation between object and subject; Hegel wit
Spirit; Marx without dialectics. But it is also in another radic
the Earth is no longer "objective"; it cannot be put at a
emptied of all Its humans. Human action is visible every
construction of knowledge as well as in the production of th
those sciences are called to register.
What seems impossible, however, in Serres's solution i
idea of establishing a new social compact with all those
Not that the idea of a contract is odd (contrary to many
proposition), but because in a quarter of a century, thing
so urgent and violent that the somewhat pacific project
among parties seems unreachable. War is infinitely mor
contract. Or else we will have to appeal to another body o
civil law to penal law. Words such as symbiosis, harmony, agr
all those ideals of deep ecology smack of an earlier, less b
Since then everything has taken a turn for the worse. T
hope for is to stick to a new sort of jus gentium that wo
against one another and against what James Lovelock h
revenge of Gaia."15 As Isabelle Stengers puts it, now the task
try to "protect us."16 The new subjects subjected to the vaga
own interconnected collisions are not trying to negotia
but to engage in a sort of parley much more primitive th

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 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

place or the court of law. No time for commerce. No

oaths. Contrary to Hobbes's scheme, the "state of natu
a dangerous tendency to follow, and not to precede o
the time of the civil compact. In twenty-three years,
zation has regressed so much that Serres's stopgap so
mind a strange form of nostalgia: yes, at the time, it
to dream of making a "contract with nature." But Gaia
altogether—maybe also a different sovereign,17

So, to profit from Serres's insight freed from his le

have to dig a bit deeper and detect how the different
mobilized in geostory might be able to swap the vari
fine their agencies. "Trait" is precisely the technical w
law, geopolitics, science, architecture, and geometry t
designate this trading zone between former objects and

Moreover the word trait, in French, like draft in English, mea

bond and the basic stroke of writing: dot and long mark, a
written contract obligates and ties those who write their na
its clauses. . . . Now the first great scientific system, Newton'
by attraction: there's the same word again, the same trait, the sam
planetary bodies grasp or comprehend one another and are bound
but a law that is the spitting image of a contract, in the primary
cords. The slightest movement of any one planet has imme
the others, whose reactions act unhindered on the first. T
constraints, the Earth comprehends, in a way, the point of view
since it must reverberate with the events of the whole system

How extraordinary to claim that the best example of a

is Newton's law of gravitation! How can you drag Newton'
an anthropocentric argument about "points of view" and "
There is nobody there to "see" and to "interpret" anyt
just the type of slippage from one language game to
made Serres's anthropology of science so open to crit
generally, that have subjected the humanities to so m
problem, of course, is to do justice to this sentence w
simply as a clever metaphor. To move on we have to
to clearly understand the conditions under which it co
more than an image.
Thanks to a magnificent paper by Simon Schaffer,19
remember that Newton himself had to generate out o
a set of traits for the new agent that came to be know

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AGENCY AT THE TIME OF THE ANTHROPOCENE

To be sure, it was not anthropomorphic, but rather ange

combat Cartesian tourbillons, Newton had to think of an
transport action at a distance instantaneously. At the time, t
character available to him that could be entrusted with t
tion of instantaneous movement, except angels... Hundre
angelology later, Newton could progressively clip their w
form this new agent into a "force." A "purely objective"
but still powered, from behind, by thousands of years of
an angelic "instant messaging system." Purity is not what sc
of: behind the force, the wings of angels are still invisibl
As the whole history of science—and Serres himself for a l
his earlier work—has often shown, it is difficult to follow t
of scientific concepts without taking into account the vas
ground that allows scientists to first animate them, and
later, to deanimate them. Although the official philosophy o
the latter movement as the only important and rationa
opposite is true: animation is the essential phenomenon;
a superficial, ancillary, polemical, and more often than n
one.20 One of the main puzzles of Western history is not tha
people who still believe in animism," but the rather nai
many still have in a deanimated world of mere stuff; just at
when they themselves multiply the agencies with which
deeply entangled every day. The more we move in geosto
this belief seems difficult to understand.

There are at least two ways, one from semiotics and the other from
ontology, to direct our attention to the common ground of agency be
fore we let it bifurcate into what is animated and what is deanimated.

Let's try semiotics first.

In novels, readers have no difficulty in detecting the great number of
contradictory actions with which characters are simultaneously endowed.
Witness, for instance, in this famous passage of Tolstoy's War and Peace,
Prince Kutuzov's decision to finally get into action:

The Cossack's report, confirmed by horse patrols who were sent out, was the
final proof that events had matured. The tighdy coiled spring was released, the
clock began to whirr and the chimes to play. Despite all his supposed power, his
intellect, his experience, and his knowledge of men, Kutuzov—having taken into
consideration the Cossack's report, a note from Bennigsen who sent personal
reports to the Emperor, the wishes he supposed the Emperor to hold, and
the fact that all the generals expressed the same wish—could no longer check the
inevitable movement, and gave the order to do what he regarded as useless and
harmful—gave his approval, that is, to the accomplished fact}1

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 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

If we are here miles away from the idea of a supr

mastering his decisions as a rational subject, neither is
fact" forcing Kutuzov as if he were a passive object. In
agricultural metaphor ("events have matured') followe
chanical one ("the clock began to play'), many other ele
taken into account: a highly doubtful dispatch from a
against him by his own aide-de-camp, the gentle pressu
as well as his own tentative interpretation of the Emp
in the end, the movement "is inevitable," the supreme
though he regards it "as useless and harmful," "gave th
his approval." (As readers of the novel will remember
remainder of the passage, will do everything to delay
which nonetheless he will win in the end because he has succeeded in
doing next to nothing against the agitated marches and countermarches
of Napoleon's Great Army!)
If we tend to find this nondecision by a supreme commander so real
istic, it is precisely because the author mixes up all the traits that could
allow us to distinguish objects and subjects—"accomplished facts" and
"inevitable movement" on the one hand and, on the other, "power, intellect,
experience, and knowledge. " Great novels disseminate the sources of actions
in a way that the official philosophy available at their time is unable to
follow. There is here a more general lesson to be drawn. What makes
the Moderns so puzzling for an anthropologist is that there is never
any resemblance in the traits attributed to objectivity and subjectivity
and the reality of their distribution. This is what allowed me to say that
"we have never been modern."22 At the time of the Anthropocene, with
its utter confusion between objects and subjects, it is probable that the
reading of Tolstoy would do a great deal of good for the geoengineers
portrayed in Clive Hamilton's frightening new book, in which he reviews
the many schemes to save the planet, each crazier than the next.23 Given
that those who believe they will be in command—those whom Hamilton
calls Earthmasters—will never control things better than Kutuzov, if we
give them the Earth, what a mess they'll make of it!
You might object that novelists are paid to fathom the folds of the
human soul, and that it is no wonder they are able to complicate what
philosophers would instead prefer to clarify. And it is true that in Kutu
zov's example, there is no agent that would count as a real natural force.
In spite of the mechanical metaphors, we remain among humans. But
let me take now an example from a bestseller with the very modernist
title: The Control of Nature?* John McPhee's document is a remarkable set
of stories about how heroic humans are dealing with invincible natural
agents—water, landslides, and volcanoes. What interests me here are

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AGENCY AT THE TIME OF THE ANTHROPOCENE

the two literal trade-offs between, on one side, two rivers, t

and the Atchafalaya, and on the other, those two compet
a human agency, the US Army Corps of Engineers.
The situation McPhee describes is the following: if the M
tinues flowing east of New Orleans, it is thanks to a singl
upstream at a small bend of the river, that protects the gian
its capture by the much smaller, but unfortunately much lo
of the Atchafalaya. If this dam were to be breached (the
every year), the whole of the Mississippi would end up m
west of New Orleans, causing massive floods and interr
part of the US economy's transport infrastructure.
Needless to say the Army Corps of Engineers has not
Twain's classically retromodern admonition:

One who knows the Mississippi will promptly aver—not aloud b

that ten thousand River Commissions, with the mines of the wor
cannot tame that lawless stream, cannot curb it or confine it, c
"Go here," or "Go there," and make it obey; . . . the Commissio
bully the comets in their courses and undertake to make them
to bully the Mississippi into right and reasonable conduct.25

On the contrary, the Corps has gone to amazing extrem

Mississippi in its course and to help it resist capture by t
Only by letting part of the flow go through the dam ar
finesse this threat, while worrying that severe flooding m
whole structure away.
No matter how fascinating the situation is, I cannot dwell
long, any more than I have the time to follow the tours
War and Peace. I just want to draw attention to the swapping
a portion of McPhee's narrative:

The Corps was not in a political or moral position to kill the At

to feed it water. By the principles, of nature, the more the Atcha
the more it would want to take, because it was the steeper stre
was given, the deeper it would make its bed. The difference in
the Atchafalaya and the Mississippi would continue to increase,
conditions for capture. The Corps would have to deal with that. T
have to build something that could give the Atchafalaya a porti
sippi and at the same time prevent it from taking all.26

The expression "by the principles of nature" does not withdra

the conflicts that McPhee stages between the two rivers,
in Tolstoy's account the "release of the tightly coiled spring

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 10 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

up all the will out of Kutuzo

tion between a smaller but d
one is what provides the goal
a vector, what justifies the wor
thus more dangerous actor.
it is to be an agent. In spite o
goals from "physical" actors,
ways pointing out the danger
we should be just as wary of
them, that is, of giving them
causal antecedents. Especially
activated through a structure
a way to "prevent it from ta
exemplification of Serres's ar
with former natural agents ("t
of view of the other bodies")
engineering could mean: on t
mastery; on the side of the
the engineers says, the quest
capturing the whole river is "
states: "So far we have been
leviate" is a good verb that K
Yes, one could say, but journ
just like novelists; you know
add some action to what, in
will, goal, target, or obsession
and nature, they can't help b
soever. Anthropomorphism is
to sell their newspapers. Wer
objective natural forces," th
The concatenation of causes
real material world is made u
because, precisely—and that'
already there in the cause: no
tion, no metamorphosis, no am
this not what rationalism is all about?
Such at least is the conventional view of the ways in which scientific
accounts should be written; a convention that is maintained in classrooms
and boardrooms, even though it can be disproved by the most cursory
reading of any scientific article. Consider the beginning of this paper
from my former colleagues at the Salk Institute:

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AGENCY AT THE TIME OF THE ANTHROPOCENE 11

The ability of the body to adapt to stressfiil stimuli and the role of
tion in human diseases has been intensively investigated. Cortico
factor (CRF), a 41-residue peptide, and its three paralogous pe
(Ucn) 1, 2, and 3, play important and diverse roles in coordinatin
nomic, metabolic, and behavioral responses to stress. CRF fam
their receptors are also implicated in the modulation of additiona
system functions including appetite, addiction, hearing, and
act peripherally within the endocrine, cardiovascular, reproductive,
and immune systems. CRF and related ligands initially act by
Gprotein-coupled receptors ( GPCRs) ?

Once you factor in the acronyms and replace the passive fo

obligation of the genre) with the action of the scientist
"investigate," here you have actants—first CRF and later in
receptor for CRF—that have all the animation of the M
all the complexities of Kutuzov's decision—so much so
receptor has eluded the ingenuity of this team for half
an inanimate object, to be "implicated" in "appetite, ad
ing, and neurogenesis" and to "act peripherally" within
cardiovascular, reproductive, gastrointestinal, and imm
that's quite a lot of "animation."
As I discovered many years ago in this very same labo
what makes scientific accounts so well suited for a semiotic
there is no other way to define the characters of the ag
lize but via the actions through which they have to be s
Contrary to generals like Kutuzov and rivers like the M
competences—that is, what they are—are defined long afte
mances—that is, what they do. The reason is that the du
is able to imagine, no matter how vaguely, a Russian m
Mississippi River by using his or her prior knowledge. But
case for CRF. Since there is no prior knowledge, every
generated from some experiment. The CRF receptor has
of actions" long before being, as they say, "characterize
competences begin to precede and no longer to follow
This is why the official version of "writing objectively" s
out of date, especially at the time when "an objective
as "at Mauna Loa, on Friday, May 3, the concentration
atmosphere was reaching 399.29 ppm" has not only bec
news, not only a story, not only a drama, but also the plot
And a tragedy that is so much more tragic than all th
since it seems now very plausible that human actors ma
on the stage to have any remedial role. . . Through a co
of Western philosophy's most cherished trope, human

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12 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

resigned themselves to playing

has unexpectedly taken on th
ening meaning of "global war
background and foreground,
and natural history that is ta

But Gaia is not the same chara

have to supplement the resul
tion. What semiotics designat
visible in texts is what I have c
the "x" standing for the first
thropo-," "angelo-," "phusi-,"
counts at first is not the pre
or shape. The point is that th
the Army Corps of Engineers
shape of a river, of an angel, o
is why it makes no sense to a
committing the sin of "anthr
cies" to what "should have no
deal with all sorts of contrad
to explore the shape of thos
are provided with a style or
recognized actors, they have,
concocted in the same pot. Ev
in novels, scientific concepts, t
born out of the same witches
all of the shape-changers reside
Now the ontological proposit
designates as a common tradi
of the world itself and not onl
Even though it is always diff
(at least in the hands of peop
limited to discourse, to lang
property of all agents in as
true of Kutuzov, of the Mississ
agents, acting means having th
the future to the present, they
the gap of existence—or else
existence and meaning are syn
meaning. This is why such mea
translated, morphed into spee
in the world is a matter of disc
discourse is due to the presen

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AGENCY AT THE TIME OF THE ANTHROPOCENE 13

Storytelling is not just a property of human langua

many consequences of being thrown in a world that
articulated and active. It is easy to see why it will be
to tell our common geostory without all of us—nov
gineers, scientists, politicians, activists, and citizens
closer within such a common trading zone. This is w
Richard Powers has been able to draw so much narr
the inner workings of scientific texts: everything i
that make up the frontier of research articles is act
In the real world time flows from the future to the
what excites scientists as well as readers of Powers's
style is another genre altogether, thanks to which t
of the world, wrongly called "the scientific worldvi
some credence.)29
The reason why such a point is always lost is becaus
during which the "scientific worldview" has reversed th
the idea of a "material world" in which the agency
making up the world has been made to vanish. A z
in which the official version of the "natural world" has shrunk all the
agents that the scientific and engineering professions keep multiplying,
comes from such a reversion: nothing happens any more since the agent
is supposed to be "simply caused" by its predecessor. All the action has
been put in the antecedent. The consequent could just as well not be
there at all. As we say in French: "il n'est là que pour faire de la figuration'
(it is only there to make up the numbers). You may still list the succes
sion of items one after the other, but their eventfulness has disappeared.
(Do you remember learning the facts of science at school? If you were
often so bored, that's why!) The great paradox of the "scientific world
view" is to have succeeded in withdrawing historicity from the world. And
with it, of course, the inner narrativity that is part and parcel of being
in the world—or, as Donna Haraway prefers to say, "with the world."30

In what way does such a proposition—a speculative one, I agree—help

in dealing with Gaia? Why does it seem so important to shift our atten
tion away from the domains of nature and society toward the common
source of agency, this "metamorphic zone" where we are able to detect
actants before they become actors; where "metaphors" precede the two
sets of connotations that will be connected; where "metamorphosis" is
taken as a phenomenon that is antecedent to all the shapes that will be
given to agents?
The first reason is that it will allow us to put aside the strange idea
that those who speak of Earth as a "living organism" are leaning toward
some backward type of animism. The criticism has been leveled against

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 14 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

James Lovelock, as if he ha
tion to the real world of "inan
is correct, Lovelock has don
deanimate many of the conn
up the sublunar domain of
he has refused to sum up al
phor of a single cybernetic
machine. It is not that we s
into its stern and solid stuff
philosophers had tried to d
deanimating the agencies tha
as well as geo-morphology,
not eliminate any of the sou
by former humans, those I
toward a common geostory.
Between matter and material
and polemical act of deanim
the other is a risky, highly
inter-capture (Deleuze's term
the narrativity of the accoun
of them. Matter is produced
present via a strange definit
letting time flow from the
tion of the many occasions t
The paradox of the present
obvious to many scientists t
no journalist, no novelist, w
in the Earth system as, for
the telling title Life as a Geol
we are from Galileo's moons!
The second reason why it is so important to detect this "metamorphic
zone" is political. Traditionally, politics needs to endow its citizens with
some capacity of speech, some degree of autonomy, and some degree of
liberty. But it also needs to associate these citizens with their matters of
concern, with their things, their circumfusa and the various domains inside
which they have traced the limits of their existence—their nomos. Politics
needs a common world that has to be progressively composed.34 Such
composition is what is required by the definition of cosmopolitics. But it is
clear that such a process of composition is made impossible if what is to
be composed is divided into two domains, one that is inanimate and has no
agency, and one which is animated and concentrates all the agencies. It's such a
division between the realm of necessity and the realm of liberty—to use

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AGENCY AT THE TIME OF THE ANTHROPOCENE 15

Kant's expression—that has made politics impossible,

early on to its absorption by The Economy. It's also what
utter impotence when confronted with the ecological
agitate ourselves as traditional political agents longing
such a liberty has no connection with a world of matt
to submit to the realm of material necessity—but such
has nothing in it that looks even vaguely like the freed
of olden times. Either the margins of actions have n
the material world, or there is no freedom left in the ma
engaging with it in any politically recognizable fashion
If the various threads of geostory could ally themselves w
of activity and dynamism, we would be free from the
distinction between nature and society, but also from
efforts to "reconcile" those two distinct domains. Ecolo
suffered just as much from attempts to "recombine" the
nature and society as from the older more violent history
two realms—that of necessity and that of freedom—t
the establishment of a contract implies that there are two
deal: nature and humanity. And nothing is changed wh
ties that are forcefully unified are both understood as "pa
Not because this would mark a too cruel "objectificat
but because such a naturalization, the imposition of s
worldview," would not do justice to any of the agents of g
Mississippi River, plate tectonics, microbes, or CRF re
than generals, engineers, novelists, ethicists, or politic
extension of politics to nature, nor of nature to politics,
to move out of the impasse in which modernism has dug
The point of living in the epoch of the Anthropo
agents share the same shape-changing destiny, a destin
followed, documented, told, and represented by using
traits associated with subjectivity or objectivity. Far from
oncile" or "combine" nature and society, the task, th
task, is on the contrary to distribute agency as far and in
a way as possible—until, that is, we have thoroughly l
between those two concepts of object and subject that
any interest any more except in a patrimonial sense. I a
are condemned by the history of philosophy to the sa
Ulysses when, at the end of the Odyssey, he is condem
to move on with a boat paddk on his shoulder until,
said, he encounters people from a nation so ignorant
ters that they will ask him: "what is this grain shovel tha
you"! The funny thing is that we don't have to travel

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 16 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

encounter people who cannot

subject paddle we carry on o
most science; most of literatur
Living with a world that has n
a big difference for the Eart
stories, when they assemble
is, around things understood
also divide them, the speech
alternate wildly—as was the c
the exact transcription of th
from its referent. Their statem
ways that will no longer be
of political discourse. Convers
decisions entangled with form
on a totally different tenor
new forms that sovereignty h
arena as what stops the discu
"geo" in geostory does not st
return of object and subject
zone"—they had both believ
tion, the other by overanima
a chance to articulate their sp
the articulation of Gaia. The
take on a new lease on life, if

Sciences Po, Paris

NOTES

Lecture prepared for the Holberg Prize Symposium 2013: "From Economics to Ecolo
Bergen, June 4, 2013, under the title "Which Language Shall We Speak with Gai
thank Mary Jacobus for having organized this symposium and Michael Flower for
recting the English.
This work has benefited from the ERC grant "An Inquiry Into Modes of Existence,"
N°269567.
1 Johan Rockström et al, "A Safe Operating Space for Humanity," Nature 461, no. 24
(September 24, 2009) and a vigourous critique in "The Planetary Boundaries Hypothesis :
A Review of the Evidence," http://thebreakthrough.org/archive/planetary_bounda
ries_a_mislead.
2 Bronislaw Szerszynski, Nature, Technology and the Sacred (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2005) ;
Michael S. Northcott, A Political Theology of Climate Change (Grand Rapids, MI : Wm. B.
Eerdmans, 2013).
3 Michel Serres, The Natural Contract, trans. Elizabeth Macarthur and William Paulson
(Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1995), 86.
4 James Lovelock, Homage to Gaia: The Life of an Independent Süentist (Oxford: Oxford
Univ. Press, 2000).

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AGENCY AT THE TIME OF THE ANTHROPOCENE 17

5 Charles D. Keeling, "Rewards and Penalties of Monitoring the Earth,"

of Energy and Environment 23 (1998): 25-82.
6 Dipesh Chakrabarty, 'The Climate of History: Four Theses," Critical I
(2009): 197-222.
7 Bertold Brecht, Life of Galileo (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1980).
8 Fred Pearce, With Speed and Violence: Why Scientists Fear Tipping Points i
(Boston: Beacon Press, 2007).
9 Mike Hulme, Why We Disagree About Climate Change: Understanding Cont
and Opportunity (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2009).
10 Alexandre Koyré, From the Closed-World to the Infinite Universe (Baltimore
Univ. Press, 1957).
11 Isabelle Stengers, Cosmopolitics I, trans. Robert Bononno (Minne
Minnesota Press, 2010).
12 Serres, The Natural Contract, 86.
13 Eduardo Kohn, How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology beyond the
and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 2013).
14 Bruno Latour, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the
Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 2013).
15 James Lovelock, The Revenge of Gaia: Earth's Climate Crisis and the Fate of
York: Basic Books, 2006).
16 Stengers, Au temps des catastrophes: Résister à la barbarie qui vient (Paris: L
2009).
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tures on Natural Religion, http://www.Bruno-Latour.Fr/Sites/Default/F
Gifford-Six-Lectures_l.pdf), 2013.
18 Serres, The Natural Contract, 108-9.
19 Simon Schaffer, "Newton on the Beach: The Information Order of Principia Math
ematical History of Sdence 47, no. 157 (2009): 243-76.
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21 Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (London:
Vintage Books, 2008), xx.
22 Latour, We Have Never Been Modem, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
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25 Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2000), 131.
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27 Christy Rani Grace et al., "Structure of the N-terminal domain of a type B1 G protein
coupled receptor in complex with a peptide ligand," PN A S 104, no. 12 (2007): 4858-63.
28 Richard Powers, The Gold Bug Variations (New York: William Morrow, 1991); The Echo
Maker (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2006).
29 Françoise Bastide, Una Notte con Satumo : Scritti semiotid sul discorso sdentifico, trans.
Roberto Pellerey (Rome: Meltemi, 2001).
30 Donna J. Haraway, When Spedes Meet (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2008).
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MIT Press, 2008).
32 Adrian Parr, TheDeleuzeDictionary, rev. ed. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press, 2010).
33 Peter Westbroek, Life as a Geological Force: Dynamics of the Earth (New York: Norton,
1991).

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 18 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

34 Latour and Peter Weibel, eds., Ma

bridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005).
35 Bernard Yack, The Longing for T
from Rousseau to Marx and Nietzsch
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36 Philippe Descola, Beyond Nature and Culture, trans. Janet Lloyd. (Chicago: Univ. of
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