Rather, he describes our home as a “critical zone,” a thin layer of sun-energized life atop the compressed remnants of the past. As part of the exhibition Critical Zones at the ZKM in Karlsruhe, Germany, which he curated, Bruno Latour talks about the critical zone, this unsuspected territory that we must get to know and inhabit, in order to finally terrestrialize ourselves. Une recherche d’Alexandra Arènes (en cours) avec Bruno Latour et le réseau OZCAR (Observatoires de la Zone Critique) coordonné par Jérôme Gaillardet, Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris. Can we provide an answer to our current disorientation–an alternative notion, to use MacLeish’s word–that isn’t so strange as to disorient ourselves all the more? Watching and listening, I was reminded of the outdoor installations I saw last year at the AURORA exhibit in downtown Dallas, which I wrote about here on the blog. Ritual re-tellings came last December in news articles commemorating the fifty-year anniversary of “Earthrise,” taken by the astronauts on Apollo 8. The strength of the critical zone as a representation, as Latour himself admits, is that it foregrounds “processes and transformation.” That seems right. The critical zone consists of “nothing but the activity of the living.” It’s sensitive, fragile, far from equilibrium, and hard to know. Latour’s critical zone is an attempt to “triangulate” the local and global in a different way–a way that faces climate deterioration full on. On Christmas Day, 1968, the day after “Earthrise” was first published, poet and writer Archibald MacLeish offered an appreciation which was published on the front page of the Times. Image credit: NASA. The unspoken message being, of course, good thing we didn’t listen to them! Even a young kid drawing his or her house is trying to represent something they are actually dwelling in, and is usually capable also of explaining the necessary distinctions. He is especially known for his work in the field of science and technology studies (STS). I especially appreciated the good sense in your last sentence: “More generally, I have no doubt that epistemological re-orientations inspired by such imagery will occur; I would caution, however, that not everyone will embrace or adopt the new perspectives and not all new perspectives will align with each other.”. Can we provide an answer to our current disorientation–an alternative notion, to use MacLeish’s word–that isn’t so strange as to disorient ourselves all the more? This is especially impressive because I also often wonder, can this actually happen? Depuis une dizaine d’année, le philosophe Bruno Latour et Frédérique Aït-Touati s’associent pour des projets au croisement de la recherche et du théâtre. Watching and listening, I was reminded of the outdoor installations I saw last year at the AURORA exhibit in downtown Dallas, which I wrote about here on the blog. https://s-usih.org/2021/01/usih2021-in-dialogue-the-politics-of-black-freedom/ Bruno Latour, sociologue, anthropologue et philosophe des sciences est une figure majeure du monde intellectuel Français et international. It seems on the face of it an odd proposition that “We can’t represent home and be in it simultaneously.” While the status of a representation is always subject to the medium, the context, the craft or aesthetic input, and to an extent the audience, there’s no particular logical conclusion to be drawn that this means we can’t also be in that part of human life thus represented. Images of the earth in space are only the most prominent example of an insistence on perceiving ourselves from outside the world. The jury is still out. The systems theorist Gregory Bateson would likely have smiled on this conception of complexly interrelated circuits running transforms of meaning in varying spans of time. Celebrated French philosopher Bruno Latour travels with Duke University Critical Zone scientist Daniel D. Richter, PhD to the John C. Calhoun Critical Zone Observatory (CZO) in rural South Carolina to observe how deep soil erosion gives a more nuanced view of the Anthropocene. The local/global is an attractive alternative dynamic to the tribal campfire, but it has its blind spots. Latour and his collaborators, like the AURORA artists, seem to begin from the premise that we require radical reorientation to bring perception and experience into sync. 9 mars 2020, par Sylvie Galle, par Sylvie Galle Therefore, we reserve the right to remove any comments that contain any of the above and/or are not intended to further the discussion of the topic of the post. Can epistemology be rebuilt from the ground up? What if what is celebrated as new perspective was actually the stubborn persistence of the old? semaine intensive 1 B Latour B Publié le 5 février 2020 à 760 × 570 dans OCT.19 : Zone critique : première semaine intensive avec Bruno Latour ← Précédent Critical Zones: The Science and Politics of Landing on Earth, edited by Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, is copublished by MIT Press and ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe. Although shorn of patriarchal language and modernist despair, Latour’s scheme is formally similar. Marqué par Heimat, la série télévisée d’Edgar Reitz, Bruno Latour a depuis adopté ce mot qui jamais n’oblige à l’identité ou exigerait des liens du sang.« Heimat » c’est plutôt un opérateur qui permet de saisir à nouveau, existentiellement, pour soi ou pour les autres, ce que veut dire appartenir à un lieu concret. ( Log Out /  The West’s current political situation is such that the universals of the global have been discredited and so are being abandoned for the walled-off assurances of the local. Most of all, though, it’s relatively small and thin—”tiny, tiny, tiny,” “a varnish, really”—yet containing “everything we care for, everything we have ever encountered.”, A view of Earth from 36,000 nautical miles away as photographed on May 18, 1969, from the Apollo 10 spacecraft during its trans-lunar journey toward the moon. It shows Africa, Antarctica, and the Arabian Peninsula. Latour attributes much of that moment to the fact that we find ourselves disoriented in time and space, due largely to a misleading cosmology. Images of the earth in space are only the most prominent example of an insistence on perceiving ourselves from outside the world. Anthony — thanks, I now realize that that I didn’t see the link to the actual lecture, which I will watch at the next opportunity. The photo became the environmental movement’s icon, the story in The New York Times reported, “a gift of perspective at the end of a dark year.” As iconic as “Earthrise” is “The Blue Marble,” taken by Apollo 17 in 1972, which has been called “the most environmental photograph ever taken.”. What I’m suggesting here is what if these photos–“Earthrise,” “The Blue Marble,” and their like, as exquisite as they are–didn’t mark change but continuity? This view of the rising Earth was captured by Apollo 8 astronauts on December 24, 1968 as they came from behind the Moon after the fourth nearside orbit. Citing the same 1968 MacLeish NYT piece that you cite here, Maher notes that indeed the early reaction to earth views from space was to call for peace and brotherhood; eventually NASA began (initially with halfhearted commitment) to incorporate environmental projects into its missions; yet it was not until Earth Day in 1990 that the blue marble image became a widespread symbol of global environmentalism. If you have the chance, check out the Latour lecture. The critical zone consists of “nothing but the activity of the living.” It’s sensitive, fragile, far from equilibrium, and hard to know. Meanwhile the denial of the climate crisis, a crucial intellectual component to this movement, allows the new localists to blame the failures of the global on those outside the walls. Inside s’intéresse par exemple à la « zone critique », cette mince surface où l’air, le sol, le sous-sol et le monde du vivant interagissent. Link: http://ga.geidai.ac.jp/en/indepth/bruno2018en/, On Christmas Day, 1968, the day after “Earthrise” was first published, poet and writer Archibald MacLeish offered an appreciation which was published on the front page of the Times. Zone Critique – Frédérique Aït-Touati « Nous ne sommes pas le nombre que nous croyions être » – relire Les Microbes, guerre et paix, de Bruno Latour – AOC media Fictions of the Cosmos: Science and Literature in the Seventeenth Century Récits de la Terre Words like “chaos,” “disorder,” “disarray,” “confusion,” appear not just in the primary sources, not just in the polemics of higher education administrators/commentators writing during this time, but persist in many historians’ characterizations of the moment. As an alternative, Latour invites his audience to join him back inside “caveland,” where it’s dark, wet, complex, and confusing. But if we were to let go of this fond conviction, Bruno Latour asks, what would the world look like? That’s really where the action is. It is as if we’d actually lived Plato’s myth and exited the cave into an ether of pristine abstraction and objectivity. Ils développent ensemble au sein de la compagnie Zone Critique différentes formes d’écriture théâtrale et performative : des conférences - © 2007—2021 Society for U.S. What I’m suggesting here is what if these photos–“Earthrise,” “The Blue Marble,” and their like, as exquisite as they are–didn’t mark change but continuity? The critical zone is an attempt to overcome this paradox. Bruno Latour* Sciences Po, 27 Rue Guillaume, Paris 07, France Abstract The relatively new concept of “critical zones”, much like that of the “Anthropocene”, signals an interesting twist in the ways to approach life-sustaining systems on Earth and thus a new way to understand the prefix “geo” in geopolitics. By Bruno Latour, the term is extended to a critical, participatory relationship to our living world, whose threatened state has reached an unprecedented scale in the Earth's now man-made history. Intellectual History, “the most environmental photograph ever taken.”, inside a kind of whirlpool, a vortex of processes in the sunshine, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Latour and his collaborators, like the AURORA artists, seem to begin from the premise that we require radical reorientation to bring perception and experience into sync. There’s a nostalgia for the good old days, not just in authors of the time who were disaffected with various manifestations of modernity, but in historians who write about them — and it’s not intentional. Mais dans Inside il est pris dans un sens en relation avec la couche superficielle de la terre à savoir ces quelques The opinions expressed on the blog are strictly those of the individual writers and do not represent those of the Society or of the writers’ employers. I’m seeing the same thing in the historiography of higher education when it comes to things like the introduction of the elective system, the utilitarian rationale behind the land grants, the professionalization of the professoriate, etc., and how all these have impacted the undergraduate curriculum. The story, perhaps a legend, goes something like this: a handful of photographs of the earth in space, supplied by the Apollo missions during the nineteen-sixties and early seventies, clarified for humankind the wholeness and lonely fragility of our planet. Il est professeur émérite à Sciences Po Paris où il a créé il y a plus de dix ans « l’Ecole des arts politiques »… qui résume bien à la fois son enseignement et son projet de chercheur : une approche pluridisciplinaire qui se propose de réarticuler les liens entre les arts, les sciences et la p… The story is often accompanied by some version of this flourish: Isn’t it ironic that these very images that made us newly reverent for the environment came from the space program, which the environmentalists of the time had disparaged? It … Change ), You are commenting using your Facebook account. Annoying questions! The West’s current political situation is such that the universals of the global have been discredited and so are being abandoned for the walled-off assurances of the local. The Apollo photos do capture something of this in the earth’s surface glow, a vibrancy indicating organization and life. Musique : Eric Broitmann. I think that that has something laterally bonding and non-dualistic about it, and in that sense it’s not impossible that MacLeish would have accepted concurrent modes too. Instead of “medieval” and “nuclear,” Latour uses the terms “local” and “global.” Whereas MacLeish presents a linear march forward, one notion replacing the one before, Latour recognizes the local and the global as concurrent modes. Macleish’s impression has become a framing device. Anthony, this post brings up an issue I’m encountering in my own work now, and I’m so glad you highlighted it. The story, perhaps a legend, goes something like this: a handful of photographs of the earth in space, supplied by the Apollo missions during the nineteen-sixties and early seventies, clarified for humankind the wholeness and lonely fragility of our planet. Avec : Bruno Latour / Duncan Evennou. Article. Although shorn of patriarchal language and modernist despair, Latour’s scheme is formally similar. Pas exactement, si l’on en croit Bruno Latour et Frédérique Aït-Touati. As a scholar trained in intellectual history exploring the environmental humanities, I’ve written numerous sentences over the years about the need to reorganize perception, to provide a new account of reality, a new imaginary, etc. We ask that those who participate in the discussions generated in the Comments section do so with the same decorum as they would in any other academic setting or context. So my current task is finding all kinds of other words to describe what happened to the undergraduate curriculum that are descriptive but not tinged with disapproval — “multiplicitous,” “pluralizing,” “ramifying,” etc. These questions are among several I took from viewing “Inside,” a recent lecture by Bruno Latour, available on Youtube. Image credit: NASA. Images et animation : Alexandra Arènes, Axelle Grégoire, Sonia Lévy. #USIH, New Book: “The Sower and the Seer: Perspectives on the Intellectual History of the American Midwest” @WisHistory https://www.wisconsinhistory.org/pdfs/WHS_Spring_2021_Cat_web.pdf #twitterstorians #usih @NewberryLibrary @MidWestMuseums @MidwestRootsLLC @OhioHistory @The_OAH @WhaHistory @BorderlandsHist @andrew_seal, Great essay by @etshermer on "Leo Ribuffo and 'the “Paranoid Style' in American (Intellectual) Politics.” #USIH https://issforum.org/roundtables/policy/ps2021-2, Powerful stuff from @JeremiSuri: "Elite Universities Have Promoted Destructive Republican Leaders." This blog is © 2007-2018 Society for U.S. 08 Dec 2016 - Bruno Latour, anthropologist and philosopher of science, gave a talk on Critical Zone science … Bruno Latour, un philosophe et sociologue des sciences parle de la zone critique. Les sciences de la Zone Critique n’ont pas les mêmes fonctions politiques que celles des autres sciences naturelles 18. I read your last sentence as describing something like this in concrete terms. Film screening of the play »Moving Earths« by Bruno Latour, Frédérique Aït Touati and Zone Critique in the Livestream of the ZKM on May 23, 20 at 22:15 pm CEST. In the critical zone, we must maintain what we have ... A critique of how science is … Instead of “medieval” and “nuclear,” Latour uses the terms “local” and “global.” Whereas MacLeish presents a linear march forward, one notion replacing the one before, Latour recognizes the local and the global as concurrent modes. Contact eric.barstow@duke.edu for screening requests! Bruno Latour, a philosopher and anthropologist, is the author of We Have Never Been Modern, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence, Facing Gaia, Down to Earth, and many other books.He coedited (with Peter Weibel) the previous ZKM volumes Making Things Public, ICONOCLASH, and Reset Modernity! This view of the rising Earth greeted the Apollo 8 astronauts on December 24, 1968 as they came from behind the Moon after the fourth nearside orbit. This perception of our home as a globe in space has paralleled our striving for universals in political life and the globalization of the economy. Dans le cadre de l'exposition Critical Zones au ZKM de Karlsruhe en Allemagne, dont il a assuré le commissariat, Bruno Latour vient nous parler de la zone critique, ce territoire insoupçonné que l'on doit apprendre à connaître et habiter, pour enfin se terrestrialiser. These questions are among several I took from viewing “Inside,” a recent lecture by Bruno Latour, available on Youtube. Photo credit: NASA. Macleish’s early interpretation of the “Big Blue Marble” has been somewhat uncritically adopted by commentators looking back at this historic moment. Latour’s critical zone is an attempt to “triangulate” the local and global in a different way–a way that faces climate deterioration full on. Du 28/10 au 31/10, Première semaine intensive avec Bruno Latour, et quelques invités surprise : Eduardo VIVEIROS de CASTRO, Deborah DANOWSKI … > Découverte de la Zone critique expliquée par Jérôme GAILLARDET, professeur de géochimie des enveloppes externes … Photo credit: NASA, Ritual re-tellings came last December in news articles commemorating the fifty-year anniversary of “Earthrise,” taken by the astronauts on Apollo 8. 2017 – POLEARTH Sciencespo Paris (Politique de la Terre à … The Society for U.S. His brief column may indeed be the source of the “Earthrise” legend, or in any case, it’s first telling. Meanwhile the denial of the climate crisis, a crucial intellectual component to this movement, allows the new localists to blame the failures of the global on those outside the walls. He then employs a history of thought that, while not uncontested, is still in use today. In summarizing Latour, I certainly may have over-simplified his thinking–I hope readers will be inspired to go to the source and check out his lecture, “Inside.” Martin, it’s clear you see what Latour is getting at, and I can’t disagree–or imagine Latour could, either–with your point about the value of representations as critique. The photo is displayed here in its original orientation, though it is more commonly viewed with the lunar surface at the bottom of the photo. So I applaud and admire the efforts of Latour and his collaborators to do just that. The systems theorist Gregory Bateson would likely have smiled on this conception of complexly interrelated circuits running transforms of meaning in varying spans of time. Image Credit: NASA. It may be the case too — I’m not sure — that Latour is opening the door to the nation as another version of the cave, which would not be a bad metaphor for the dangerously nostalgic and self-regarding nationalisms we see growing across the world. What if what is celebrated as new perspective was actually the stubborn persistence of the old? “Men’s conception of themselves and each other has always depended on their notion of the earth,” he begins. Depuis une dizaine d’année, le philosophe Bruno Latour et Frédérique Aït-Touati s’associent pour des projets au croisement de la recherche et du théâtre. The lecture is a collaboration with some artists and designers whose projected 3-D images surround Latour on the stage as he speaks, sometimes obscuring him completely. It should be more a pragmatic assumption that we have, fortunately, representations of our home that we also live in, even if — and I wouldn’t deny this — such representations can seem like a refuge from reality at times, or be misused in ideological conflict. In an instant, all wars became civil wars, all fights fights between family, and the necessity of caring for our shared environment a shattering revelation. In an instant, all wars became civil wars, all fights fights between family, and the necessity of caring for our shared environment a shattering revelation. Rather, he describes our home as a “critical zone,” a thin layer of sun-energized life atop the compressed remnants of the past. Latour attributes much of that moment to the fact that we find ourselves disoriented in time and space, due largely to a misleading cosmology. Unfortunately the novelty effect ran its course; certain constituencies have definitely altered their views based on the small-isolated-planet imagery (or in some cases the imagery reinforced views they had already adopted); yet other persons or groups soon forgot the message; and, of course, organized push back from ideological or economic agents have helped to close that window of opportunity. Tags: Bruno Latour, cosmology, critical zone, globalization. Intellectual History is a nonpartisan educational organization. It isn’t easy, because the default view of the period is “curricular chaos,” but that’s just one perspective among many, just as Macleish’s read of that photo was one perspective among many. The photo provided “a unifying expression of vulnerability,” said the story in The Washington Post. Co-production : Théâtre Nanterre-Amandiers, Künstlerhaus Mousonturm Frankfurt Change ), Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window), Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window), “the most environmental photograph ever taken.”, http://ga.geidai.ac.jp/en/indepth/bruno2018en/. The Apollo photos do capture something of this in the earth’s surface glow, a vibrancy indicating organization and life. It is as if we’d actually lived Plato’s myth and exited the cave into an ether of pristine abstraction and objectivity. We welcome suggestions for corrections to any of our posts. ... Bruno Latour is a philosopher and sociologist of science at Sciences-Po Paris. A version of this post appears at the Society for US Intellectual History blog. Seeing this from outside, however, extracts us from it, Latour argues. The Visualization of the Critical Zone. The jury’s always out–it’s almost never in, come to think of it. « La première leçon du coronavirus est aussi la plus stupéfiante : la preuve est faite, en effet, qu’il est possible, en quelques semaines, de suspendre partout dans le monde et au même moment, un système économique dont on nous disait jusqu’ici qu’il était impossible à ralentir ou à rediriger. “Men’s conception of themselves and each other has always depended on their notion of the earth,” he begins. But it seeps into the language that we use to frame the past. (all published by the MIT Press). Later there was “the nuclear notion,” which removed them from that center and made them “helpless victims in a senseless farce.” But now, with this photograph, we’d seen earth for the first time “from the depths of space,” “whole and beautiful and round and small.” Perhaps now a new notion of the earth, and of ourselves, was possible, and we could see ourselves “together, brothers on that that bright loveliness in the eternal cold.” Senselessness, might be exchanged for solidarity, presumably, and “man may at last become himself.”. ( Log Out /  Not long ago I reviewed a book that dealt with this issue: Neil Maher, Apollo in the Age of Aquarius (Reviews in American History, June 2018); while I cannot recommend the book with overall enthusiasm, its section on Whole Earth environmentalism and the public reception of NASA’s “blue marble” photo of earth in 1972 is informative. ( Log Out /  With the rise of science, we moderns believe, the world changed irrevocably, separating us forever from our primitive, premodern ancestors.