Res Extensa to Res Publica
by Adam Robbert
If you have not had a chance to read it, Bruno Latour’s COMPOSITIONIST MANIFESTO is, and I do not mean to be uncritical, a work of genius. If you have spent any time reading this blog then you know I have been hunting down the connection between actors, objects and ecology for some time (still flashing lights into the darker corners of language for the right name: ecological realism? object-oriented ecology? the ecology of objects? rooted networks?).
Recently I have also found renewed interest in William James’ A Pluralistic Universe, precisely because so much of Latour’s work is rooted, in part, in a pluralistic cosmology and also through Latour’s commitment to a radical democracy. My LAST POST focused on beginning a conversation between the common use of “pluriverse” in both James and Latour to explore a politics of nature, science and society. All of this has led me to consider not just the political link between democracy and ecology, but also their ontological link. Is ecology, finally, a kind of democracy? Is democracy a kind of ecology? The radical implication of asking such a question, I think, lies less in the intuition that we need to risk socializing “Nature” or naturalizing “Society,” but rather in considering them already as public spaces of interaction that care not for demarcations between cosmos and socius.
I have suggested previously, and am still working out the details, of a three-fold structure of ecology (Nature, Media and Knowledge), so while I’m all for making ontological distinctions so as not to blur together disparate domains, as I think it through, ecology and democracy seem more like consilient concepts everyday.
In the Compositionist Manifesto, Latour has updated and streamlined many of his arguments in Politics of Nature (though to Latour’s credit I don’t think he has sacrificed any of the nuances of his argument.) Latour writes:
This is precisely the point where compositionism wishes to take over: what is the successor of nature? Of course, no human, no atom, no virus, no organism has ever resided “in” nature understood as res extensa. They have all lived in the pluriverse, to use William James’ expression —where else could they have found their abode? As soon as the Bifurcation had been invented at the time of Descartes and Locke, it had been immediately undone. No composition has ever been so fiercely decomposed. Remember: “we have never been modern”, so this utopia of nature has always been just that, a utopia, a world of beyond without any realistic handle on the practice of science, technology, commerce, industry (p. 6).
Here again we see the res extensa and the pluriverse encountering one another suggesting the need for a new account of “the real” totally different in character from Descartes famous extended substance (this substance for Descartes is the mechanistic and determined functioning of a nonhuman cosmos, freedom and the soul are anchored only in the divine nature of human beings, who through this relation are capable of such things as thought and free will, all else is conceived as an enormous machine grinding away surreptitiously). The res publica on the other hand takes as its starting point an entirely different view of the cosmos and of matter:
It is no longer possible to build the cage of nature —and indeed it has never been possible to live in this cage. This is, after all, what is meant by the eikos of ecology. Call it “animism” if you wish, but it will no longer be enough to brand it with the mark of infamy. This is indeed why we feel so close to the 16th century, as if we were back before the “epistemological break”, before the odd invention of matter (a highly idealist construct as Whitehead has shown so well). As science studies and feminist theory have documented over and over again, the notion of matter is too political, too anthropomorphic, too narrowly historical, too ethnocentric, too gendered, to be able to define the stuff out of which the poor human race, expulsed from Modernism, has to build its abode (p. 12).
Simply thinking out a move from a worldview that sees the nonhuman as res extensa to a worldview that sees this cosmos as res publica is not enough to salvage the multiple crises of modernity and globalization, but it is surely a step towards a geological epoch worthy of a different name than simply the “Anthropocene.”
So Latour takes Descartes’ already given (i.e., natural) extended substance and turns it into a public space whose construction is contested by a diversity of interactors? I wonder, what does privacy look like in the pluriverse? Is the private soul (of a person, or the essence of a thing) just another contested public space, a conditioned form constituted by its relations? Or does the soul of each thing withdraw from its relations into a priviverse, only revealing its sensual notes rather then its essential self to other members of the cosmopolis? There is clearly (I think) some sort of unity in diversity, a participation of the particular in the universal. But how to exemplify this participation in our human forms of sociality while avoiding both the equally regressive extremes of mass-mindedness and individualism?
I think rather than a “contested” space, Latour would emphasize the co-production of a common world, not the deconstruction or critique of an already existing one. Of course, Latour’s position is partly a critique of what he calls the “two houses” in “Politics of Nature.” The first house belongs to Descartes “res extensa” and “Nature,” the second house to politics and epistemology. The first cannot be composed collectively because it is already thought to exist as a fixed, unitary entity. The second cannot be composed collectively precisely because contestation can occur indefinitely because it has no access to the first house of “Nature” (obviously this has a lot to do with correlationism and the modernist split of primary/secondary qualities). So I would say Latour is opening up the two houses to a creative and mutual composition of each domain, rather than to an ongoing environment of contestation. This is constructive philosophy after all.
The comments on withdrawal come from Graham Harman and not so much from Latour and James (as you know). Though both Latour and Harman do have elements to their thinking that show how each makes room for individuals that exceed their external relations.
The private soul, or interiority in general, are elements that are for the most part absent from Latour’s work (at least in my reading). With Harman we get the “interiors” of larger objects within which all sensual relations occur, but that is not exactly what you are saying about the human soul. In this sense Descartes was perhaps right to make a distinction between extensa and cogito, but wrong in offering it finally only to humans, and also completely at a loss to explain the relation between the two. We don’t want a flat ontology, but we don’t want dualism either.
The unity and diversity distinction, I think, are products of a different metaphysical set up than what Latour is arguing for. Latour’s collectives are set up in such a way so as to avoid both “mass mindedness” and “individualism” precisely by opening up unity (first house) and diversity (second house) to the democracy of actors.