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Bruno Latour – We are all reactionaries todayPosted By Editors - Re-public On March 22, 2007 @ 12:51 In time/governance | 2 Comments

An interview with the vanguard contemporary thinker, Bruno Latour, on the endof progressivism, the limits of representation, the irrelevance of contemporaryparliaments, the politics of things…

(The interview is also available on podcast [1])

An interview to Konstantin Kastrissianakis for Re-public

Konstantin Kastrissianakis: If today we live in the era of simultaneity, in a space whereeverything is contemporary, can we use the terms “conservative” or “regressive” or should weabandon them altogether?

Bruno Latour: Everybody is reactionary today. The problem is not there: the problem is whichones to choose. The division of things between progressivist and reactionary ought to beabandoned precisely because the topography of time, the repartition of political passions, hasbeen overturned. Because in modernism, we were relatively easily oriented towards aprogressivist direction. So we could distinguish between progressivist and reactionary attitudeswith relative ease, reactionary being linked to the attachment to the past and progressivist tofuture emancipations. Today, however, things have changed to the extent that attachments arenot only in the past but also in the future. For example, ecological questions, issues concerningthe city and urbanism etc. As I have said in “making things public” [2], we have gone from a timeof Time to a time of Space, from a time of succession to a time of co-existence. As a result thedifferentiation is now based on the type of attachment rather than on the old reactionary andprogressivist scenography. So we are obliged to change the political passions while they stillremain relatively classic, attached to the whole package of progressivist/reactionary, liberal/neo-liberal, anti-globalising/globalizing. In effect, in the details, we have to open the package tounderstand the allocation of attachments and the dose of emancipation and attachment theypresuppose. These developments are not necessarily due to the emergence of instantaneity butprimarily to the end of modernism, to the disappearance of the arrow of time, of emancipation assole political horizon.

K.K.: Was it also a period where differences or oppositions were clearer?

B.L.: We considered them clear, but they never were. Only retrospectively do they seem clearer.Modernism was always a different thing from what it pretended to be. “We were never modern”[3].

K.K.: Now, if the watch, the calendar, technological inventions are symbols of the time thatpasses, what are the objects that represent your notion of multiple temporalities?

B.L.: The fact that progress is no longer the horizon does not mean that we abandon the notionof time. It means that time is no longer the carrier of emancipation solely, but that it carries bothemancipation and attachment. Therefore time is still there; the direction of time is still there. Wecontinue to die. We are still mortals. However, what has changed is the repartition of time: thegreat narratives that resolved people’s differences and positioned them on the basis of theirrelation to the future have been replaced by their position in relation to objects, to issues. Todayin order to see if someone is a good or a bad reactionary, we must know where his attachmentslie. Ecology, illustrates this very clearly. We can now have odd configurations: one can be bothpro-nuclear and anti-global warming. Today there is no longer a single object that rules, that

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gives rhythm to the repartition of time or to the direction of time. On the contrary, politics turnsaround objects of interest, “issues”, “affairs”, “things”, αιτία in ancient Greek. So it is of noimportance to know whether one is a reactionary or not, but to know what those objects are thatone holds dear, and the types of things to which one is attached.

The proliferation of hybrid forums

K.K.: These are political, affective things?

B.L.: Of course, political, affective. They were always interrelated: to use Peter Sloterdijk words[4], they are relations of habitat, of spheres, of atmosphere. Politics will become what he calls“spherology” which is about the habitats, artificial environments, artificial surroundings in whichwe are and co-exist. In arguments of this type, it is true that the central metaphors tend towardsspace rather than time. They are formed primarily in architecture and in co-existence rather thanin the great revolutionary narratives that reigned for centuries in their left or right versions ofhistory. Sloterdijk proposed another more interesting term [5] to replace that of revolution:“explicitation”. The history of explicitation is made increasingly intelligible in the spheres andobjects to which we are attached. Therefore the problem is not to order things according to timeor space. It is no longer hierarchical but heteriarchical. Rather, today we must try to approachthese new attachments, these new political passions. The categories of the French revolution, theleft and the right, with their specific categories and particular techniques of classification, ofpositioning, no longer correspond to the order of things. Whether we talk about global-warming,delocalisation, GMOs (genetically modified organisms), habitat or public transport, there is eachtime a different configuration of these positions. It is not that these divisions no longer exist, butthat they have been drowned in the multitude of other attitudes.

K.K.: Is it possible to argue therefore that positions are thus based more on the substance ofthese “matters of concern”?

B.L.: I don’t know where the influences come from. Politics always was object-oriented. It issimply that in the modernist scenography, where politics was one sphere amongst others, suchas those of civil society, economy, nature, we were under the impression that we could definepolitics in a procedural manner. An arena through which all kinds of affairs could pass butrepresentatives would treat them in such a way so as to standardise them. What happens todayis that the techniques of political representation no longer seem capable of absorbing themultiplicity of positions and, in any case, they are no longer capable of standardising them. Ifyou take for example the associations of patients: today, each illness has its own association.This is “politics” in a very vague sense, consisting of people who get together around “matters ofconcern”. But it is no longer political in the sense of something completing itself according to aparticular technique of representation such as the parliament, the executive, the law. While somemight reach this point, they are rare compared to the mass of hybrid forums that, as Sloterdijkputs it [6], proliferate.

K.K.: But it is not necessarily their objective to get into parliament.

B.L.: No the Parliament is a place where very little happens. We could argue that it has becomelargely irrelevant. Not because the Great Politics has been sidestepped by economic forces, butbecause the techniques of representation of the official political arena have not evolved in thesame speed as the multiplication of hybrid forums around “matters of concern”. This is what wetried to stage with the exhibition “Making Things Public [7]”. The Parliament was there as aparticular technique among the multitude of other hybrid, non-official, not necessarily legitimateforums which are very effective involving a variety of things: from the supermarket, and financeto law, technology, debates over nature, etc. Therefore there is a proliferation of “micropolitics”,to use Urlich Beck’s word [8]. In my opinion the dream of macropolitics, the sphere that couldcover all these forums, has disappeared.

K.K.: In this new configuration, how can we re-imagine a democracy capable of accommodatingthe co-existence of different temporalities or of different “matters of concern”?


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B.L.: Intellectuals cannot answer this question. Anthropologists, sociologists, philosophers canfollow what is already going on. In practice politics was always about “matters of concern”. It wasalways “issue-oriented”. The village mayor has always been aggressed or alerted by hisco-citizens on problems of garbage, roads, schools, factories, etc. It is primarily a question ofrepresentation of what always happened in politics, a problem that we could not see clearly aslong as politics was thought of either as covering the totality of activities (the “everything ispolitics” of the 1960s) or, in the opposite, as being uniquely oriented towards the official,parliamentary version of representative government. Therefore in these two positions, whichbroadly cover the ideals of the previous century, it is difficult to discern how to nourish therequirements of democracy by new means. This is because either we were within the “everythingis political”, a perspective that was revolutionary without taking into account the institutions ofdemocracy – as we know, revolutionaries are never good democrats – or we were under theimpression that democracy in its official representative form could absorb all questions thatpassed through its procedure and became politics when they arrived at the desks of ministers ordeputies. Suddenly, we pause and raise the issue of democracy whereas, in effect, people alwaysposed the question of democracy in different ways. That is, through organizing simultaneouslyhybrid forums around subjects which do not constitute objects of politics as classic notions wouldhave it.

We can take the contemporary situation regarding patient associations, no one imagined thatpolitics of health would be organized on a one-to-one basis. No one imagined that food, as it hasbecome in Italy with “slow food”, would become an object of politics. No one imagined thatsomething like the climate would become an object of politics. It is a kind of pixelisation ofpolitics. The form of politics has changed to such an extent that each pixel has its properautonomy. And the question of democracy is posed within all these spots. Therefore we couldeither say that this is no longer democracy and rather “écume”, as Sloterdijk argues [9], oralternatively we could argue that in the essence of politics, democracy carries our passions, ourbeliefs, our attachments, our engagements, issue by issue. Therefore we are not in a puresituation. It is a different situation. There are those intellectuals that work empirically who try tocapture again these new enclosures, the new forms of democracy. There are those who do it onthe web, which permits a cartography of many states of democracy in the making. In ourexposition we mobilized a lot of those sites. Some of them were really interesting, containingissues that resemble a kind of prefiguration of this very practical democracy. They were all issue-oriented. Many people work on these issues: this is the web. But in associative life there is amultitude of other elements. The great obstacle is that we cannot do the same with the economy.It remains, in the beliefs of the old left and the old right, a system obeying laws in a way thatnature no longer is. The contemporary paradox is that nature is clearly politicized whereas theeconomy remains rigid to the extent where laws are put into effect without anyone being able toexpress his opinion. It is rare to find the idea that the same pixelisation can take place in theeconomy whether within the Marxist left or the Marxist right. Whereas in practice, of course, theeconomy is pixels. It consists of small aggregates, collections, new hybrid forms, etc. It is anamusing paradox of the era that the economic nature resists more than nature itself.

K.K.: Why then do you remain sceptic as to what the internet can do?

B.L.: Because we are not completely “uploaded” on the web. Despite all, life on the web is still avery small segment of our common existence. We continue to live in relatively traditionalatmospheres: the walls, the air, heating, people who meet, who talk etc. Therefore, if democracyshould also be the power to co-exist, to use Sloterdijk’s expression “while waiting one’s turn”,without reaching a situation of extreme violence we cannot imagine transposing all ourdemocratic habits on the web. In addition, the web is not a subject of passion. It is a very smallpassion.

K.K.: But it is a tool of expression?

B.L.: An answer would be that it is more than what you are saying: it is a real space, because itis hierarchical and mimes very well a decentralized character without utopias, without relations ofzoom between places, because we can intervene in a blog at the other end of the planet. Its formis interesting from the point of view of contemporary issues. Nonetheless, it is only a firstprefiguration of future spaces in which it would be possible for democracy to be exercised. It is agood model. But there is a bit of an exaggeration when we hear about the web as offering theuniversal forums that we have lost. The notion of a universal forum is probably a notion that weshould lose. We should not wish to go back to the “global.”


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K.K.: For example, have you heard about this site which is called Second Life [10]?

B.L: Yes. Ségolène Royal has set up an electoral desk there.

K.K.: Does it represent something new or is it only a logical continuation?

B.L.: All those things that materialize the symbolic spaces, in which we live, all those things thatmake them intelligible and shareable, and countable, are interesting for the understanding ofsociety. I suppose that today there are probably as many sociologists who study Second Life asthere are users. Certainly, there are many economists and they find economic models remainingpractically unchanged. Second Life is indeed not very original from the point of view of economicrelationships. It is, however, interesting because we can see the rematerialisation, layer by layerof what existence in a virtual world means. The term “virtual” is, in fact, not appropriate becauseit is the normal state of affairs. “First Life” is virtual whereas Second Life is material since one isobliged to pay the price. Not very much, but a cost nonetheless. All those things that facilitatethe replacement of virtual relations between symbolic and material are of interest because theypreclude a lot of the nonsense that suggests that we are moving from a real world into animaginary world.

The Greeks taught us that we were in an imaginary world many years ago. Today we pay for aconnection and so we can see more clearly what it is all about. Also I think there is now a smallpolice in Second Life. Not yet real politics but there is a set of rules, of exclusions. One can beexcluded as bad alias, bad avatars. There were acts of violence, strikes, sit-ins. Therefore we findcertain elements of “First Life”. But it is not particularly original, in a strange way it is hardlyutopian. The study of second life will not be easier than that of first life. From that perspective,Second Life resembles a lot “Biosphere II [11]”, which was an attempt to reconstitute an artificialbiosphere, not virtually (not on the web) but in a situation of controlled urbanism which wouldplay an important role in the ecologists’ imagination. All these difficulties in order to construct asecond biosphere, all these efforts to constitute artificial islands are interesting.

The politics of things

K.K.: You talk about the demon of the political and how the phantom of the public could loosenit. Through a passage from Realpolitik to Dingpolitik, you explain how we could realistically“make things public”. What is exactly the notion of Dingpolitik and can the political be tamed?

B.L.: The etymology of the word demon carries two meanings: to cut and to share. Though weunderstand why, it is interesting to note that this term is equally articulated in two opposingmeanings. We see that the demon of the political cannot be simple. It is necessarily a monster.Political philosophy is a teratology, the apprenticeship of monstrosity. Those who are dangerousin political philosophy are those exactly those who think that it is not about monstrosity.Historically, in the political realm, monsters have emerged from reason, rather than throughmonstrosity itself. Therefore the question which was raised by the Dingpolitik, by the “politics ofthings” is the one that we just posed.

The political was always about “things”. However, when we read political philosophy, we do nothear about “things”. There are innumerable treatises addressing how we will create theprocedure which is going to absorb different affairs as if the procedure itself was set. As ifwhichever matter entering the parliamentary, executive machine would come out in the form oflaws and solutions. This is what we now call governance. It is a managerial version of politics.Underlying this understanding of politics are a number of presuppositions: the existence ofinstitutions, instruments and techniques of representation, which are “across the board”, whichwould equally absorb questions of ecology, economy, everyday life etc. The word Dingpolitiksignals the implausibility of this theory of the political. It is not a new politics but what I callobject-oriented politics. Since the very nature of the political always was to be concerned withobjects, can we imagine techniques of representation – including artistic and scientificrepresentation – that appropriately render this new pixelisation of the political? The politics ofthings is not a novelty. It was always there: the ding, and exists in all European languages. InGreek, αίτια. Does it also mean an assembly? It is a juridical term.


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K.K.: Today it means the “cause”.

B.L: It is the cause that we bring to the tribunal. We find ourselves somewhere between sharingand being opposed to.

K.K.: It is the cause but it can also mean the reason.

B.L.: It is a beautiful etymology that we should not lose from our sight and that was always, inessence, active in politics. However, there was a time when we wished to separate the twoarenas: on the one hand, that of the narrowly conceived political and, on the other, that of thingsand causes in their modernist version, which also corresponds to a division of tasks of thepolitical to laws and conflicts while guarding the cause outside, in the scientific domain. Whereasit was not clearly visible at the time it is now clear that all “things” have become causes. All“matters of fact” have become “matters of concern”. The enormous problem that our generationfaces is to find the conceptual and physical architectures that absorb this experience.

It is not an easy task because people continue to over-invest in traditional politics, which is avery local technique, as we can see with the ongoing French presidential campaign. It shows howcomplicated it is to give relevance to “matters of concern” with a very archaic technique andlocalized style. At the same time, however, we have also lost the great techniques that ought tostill be used today, that of eloquence, of rhetoric. Instead, we have reached a slightlydiscouraging amalgam of governances. This is all the more obvious in the programs presented tous. We are being asked to imagine that politics is set of programs that we must apply in aproblem-solving fashion. Therefore there is no longer the technique of eloquence or spin thatgives the quality of everyday life to the political. At the same time we have a technique thatremains very archaic. One could say that we are in the worse situation imaginable. We have lostthe passion of the political – something which is not necessarily bad because political passionscan also bring about disaster – and have not found the institutions and the technical forms thatwill allow us to make the system representative of all those other objects of disagreement inwhich we are already involved. This is the operation that the exhibition “Making things public”tried to put in place and, at least at a conceptual and visual, level was successful in doing.Parliaments are only one technique amongst others but I can hardly see anyone trying to makethese techniques pertinent for all other assemblies. The definition of the political is reduced andconsequently people complain that they are not sufficiently represented. The crisis ofrepresentation is increasingly eminent because of this kind of reduction of politics to techniquesof representation that no longer seem legitimate.

K.K.: But is it also because we expected too much from representation itself?

B.L.: We expected too much and too little. On the one hand, we expected a lot in terms ofcovering the totality of human life. This is Sloterdijk’s inflatable parliament [12], an enormousparliament, where everyone would debate about everything, of contracts between all, ofrespecting each other while sitting around a gigantic table at the scale of the globe. This is toomuch. On the other hand, not enough because the innumerable assemblies formed around allthese sets of disputes are considered as being an inferior form of politics. This is where Beck’sinteresting argument on micropolitics lies. Whether it is feminism or something else, it is neverconsidered sufficiently political because it is too local. Thus we accuse them of havingparticularistic interests, as if in the big sphere we had only general interests. For this reason, thephantom I staged in this exhibition, which is drawn from a book by Walter Lippmann [13], is areminder of the fact that politics should not be seen as an immense body covering the totality ofpublic life, but as a passage, as a movement. A movement, which Lippmann tried to describe inhis book The Phantom Public [14]. The public is necessarily a phantom, it cannot be a body. It isconstantly at the stage of being restarted, of being a passage, of being an assembly of all theother assemblies that are in the process of revealing new issues.

Architecture and coexistence

K.K.: Do you see any leads for a conceptual or physical architecture to “make things public”?


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B.L.: Architects have an important role to play because the notion of architecture, which wasalways important as a metaphor for public or private space, or for the repartition between publicand private space, becomes today something more than a metaphor – whether we are talkingabout virtual architecture or the architecture of cities and parks. A few days ago, I met a studentin Houston who studied people doing space architecture at NASA. This means architecture of thespace around the earth. They work at the scale of the solar system. There are architects paid byNASA to imagine the repartition of beings, objects, stations in the solar system. This means thatthe notion of architecture, the work of architecture realizes the metaphor as defined bySloterdijk. One where we are always looking for spaces of coexistence. Therefore, architecturemust play a role, but I am not adequately informed to know which architects we must follow.There is an immense distance between the problems that we are discussing here and the buildingof a construction site. In addition, architects have a peculiar relation to theoretical work. A casualone.

K.K.: Sometimes also with the public.

B.L.: I collaborated with DOMUS [15] for two years and thus I have read a bit of architecture, andstrangely enough I know quite a lot of architects, but still not enough about architecture. Design,as a kind of architecture, is very important. When it comes to natural parks, nowadays it is aquestion of design. Whether it is collective design or collaborative design, there are so manyschools to be found almost everywhere: landscaping, management of natural spaces, urbanism,they are in a process of being mixed because it is a question of constructing artificialsurroundings to life. “Life support” that captures the space of politics. What would be interestingfor architects is to reach a point where they would be interested in “matters of concern”.Meanwhile the aesthetics of architecture remain the aesthetics of objects. In design magazineswe always see objects. We do not yet see many “matters of concern”. However, when we talkwith architects, we realize that this is what it is about.

K.K.: But do you think that they can create these spaces, these architectures?

B.L.: Not alone, but they are already part of the “atmospheres of democracy”, of this collectivespace. It was always their job after all to constitute spaces. They take seriously the notions ofspace and life: they are almost defined by coexistence.

K.K.: Yes, but not necessarily. There are those who consider that if they were to take all thesethings into account, they would end up never building.

B.L.: Yes, but if you are able to build a single house it is because you take seriously the questionof coexistence. There are always walls, interfaces, neighbours. Architecture takes seriously theword coexistence even if it involves simply building a house. It is not only the case when theybuild parliaments. In fact, most parliaments are constructed in a very archaic manner. The oneby Norman Foster, in the Reichstag [16] is clearly a caricature. Using glass to say it is transparentis a silly metaphor. There are one or two other parliaments constructed recently which areinteresting, though they are rare. I don’t know how a “parliament of things” should look like. Wehad a bit of this in our exhibition, but it was a simulation for a few months in the exhibitionspace. It was done with the help of architects who gave the exhibition its shape and createdsemi-transparent panels in a very interesting manner. Are you at the A.A. (ArchitecturalAssociation)? [17]

K.K.: Yes. In fact, we are trying to re-think the habitat, the house in its relation to thecommunity. The link between domestic life and public life. The technique proposed by ourprofessor is to explore the different typologies, how different offices, hotels, hospitals,monasteries, squats work, map them, and see how individual spaces are organized in relation tocommunal and public spaces in order to propose new typologies through which to speculate onrelationships between domestic and public. We want to see if we can re-think these spaces.

B.L: For me it was always a pleasure to go to Schools of architecture and I have been in manysuch schools. I gave a conference entitled “Paris: Invisible City [18]”, it is a book now. Whenever


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I can, I try to visit architectural studios to see the projects students are undertaking. What isinteresting now is the politics of co-existence, cohabitation being a key word. I have one or twostudents who are working in architecture. But I am already out of fashion, because architectsconsume very quickly. It was for two years that I was really in fashion but now they do not speakof me very much. Practically, what I do now is not architecture, but websites of controversies. Myaim is to build websites by schematizing spaces of co-habitation of the range of uncertaintiespending on technical controversies. I am therefore using sociology of sciences. This object canalso become a debate in architecture. When I was in Houston, I saw that architects have accessto visualization programs which would be instrumental for the social sciences but we are stilllagging behind. We are still doing simplistic statistics, while we can create databases, we cancreate virtual spaces, future spaces, where we can explore hierarchies and the ad hoc characterof matters of concern. Therefore my contribution to architecture lies in a metaphorical sense ofdemocracy; to somehow create a “écume’, specific for each subject.

Further links

Bruno Latour web [19]

Iconoclash exhibition [20]

Article printed from Re-public: re-imagining democracy – english version: http://www.re-public.gr/en

URL to article: http://www.re-public.gr/en/?p=129

URLs in this post:

[1] available on podcast: http://www.re-public.gr/en/podcasts/?cat=4[2] “making things public”: http://www.bruno-latour.fr/articles/article/96-DINGPOLITIK2.html[3] “We were never modern”: http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/LATWEH.html[4] to use Peter Sloterdijk words: http://www.petersloterdijk.net/french/[5] another more interesting term: http://www.hypermoderne.com/sloterdijk_ecume.htm[6] as Sloterdijk puts it: http://multitudes.samizdat.net/Regles-pour-le-Parc-humain.html[7] Making Things Public: http://makingthingspublic.zkm.de/[8] to use Urlich Beck’s word: http://www.sagepub.co.uk/booksProdDesc.nav?contribId=600545&prodId=Book203184[9] “écume”, as Sloterdijk argues: http://multitudes.samizdat.net/Etre-ne-de-l-ecume-Spheres-III.html[10] Second Life: http://secondlife.com/[11] Biosphere II: http://www.bio2.com/index.htm[12] inflatable parliament: http://g-i-o.com/pp1.htm[13] Walter Lippmann: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Lippmann[14] The Phantom Public: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Phantom_Public[15] with DOMUS: http://www.domusweb.it/domus2k6/index.cfm?lingua=_eng#community[16] Norman Foster, in the Reichstag: http://www.fosterandpartners.com/Projects/0686/Default.aspx[17] A.A. (Architectural Association)?: http://www.aaschool.ac.uk/[18] Paris: Invisible City: http://www.bruno-latour.fr/virtual/index.html[19] Bruno Latour web: http://www.bruno-latour.fr/[20] Iconoclash exhibition: http://www.iconoclash.de/

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