Via Knowledge-Ecology, who linked to a barely audible mp3 of Latour’s recent talk at the French Institute in the UK recorded by Tim Morton. Thanks for the guerrilla media effort, Tim! I wish the Institute would release their high quality video for free!!
We should be absolutely floored by what Latour has to say here, in the sense of being knocked to our philosophical grounds, forced to think anew the metaphysical foundations we may have been presupposing. His call for political art in the anthropocene, for the composing of post-natural/post-cultural cosmograms by way of the triple representation of science, politics, and art, sounds to my ears a great deal like Panikkar’s cosmotheandric vision. Only for Latour, as for the postmodern psyche in general, human creativity (art) replaces the creativity of God. Or perhaps there has been no replacement; rather, creator and creature are no longer separated, but have been hybridized.
A whole geological age has been given to the human. We’ve measured up to and even surpassed the power of plate tectonics. What was once merely symbolic anthropomorphism has taken industrial strength steroids and become quite real. Global climate change is upon us. None of us, in isolation, is responsible. And so how are we to feel, Latour asks, about a crisis as large as the earth? How can I be rightly accused of a crime of such magnitude without feeling the least bit guilty? Without a moral body or planetary consciousness to take responsibility, climate change simply cannot be felt. It can only be denied–either outright as many conservatives have, or once removed, as those who have adopted an attitude of despondency, having no patience for the romanticization of nature.
Nature, it seems, is no more. Nor is culture. Gone are the Kantian days when we could stand in awe of the sublimity of the natural world while simultaneously raising ourselves morally above it. As Kant commanded, we have now all but manufactured the earth itself in an attempt to know it as ourselves. We have woven facts and fictions so tightly together into the dysenchanted tapestry of techno-capitalist civilization that it has become impossible to tell where culture ends and nature begins. The sublime has reappeared in cosmopolitical dress as the infinitely receding threads of actors tied to actors tied to actors composing our best theories of reality. It is doubtless a durable fabric, but we do not know where it began nor whether we can ever tie up all its loose ends.
Techno-science, by itself, is crazed, even demonic. It pretends ethics can be separated from knowledge, and research from politics. “What we used to call the humanities now composes our sanity,” says Latour. But the humanities, like the sciences, have gone the way of the Dodo. Nature and culture are at best endangered species. Latour prophecies their complete extinction, and indeed prays for their demise. We are a species gone mad, whether we like it or not. Whether caused by dementia or demonic possession, we are a species gone wrong and in need of angelic wisdom, of a message from the divine. But Gaia will not nurture us. As Latour suggests, it is now we who must nurture her. She is no more unified and loving, no more conscious of herself as an agent than human society is of itself.
Footnotes2Plato 
What do you think?