Interview: Philosopher Bruno Latour on Challenges of Identity Politics in India
Bruno
Latour is regarded as one of the most prominent thinkers of our time,
weaving together philosophy, anthropology and sociology. Seen as one of the
founders of science and technology studies, and the actor-network-theory, his
2013 book ‘An Inquiry Into Modes of Existence’,
tries to offer a new philosophical anthropology of the ‘Moderns’.
In 2015,
building upon his The Gifford Lectures, he
published ‘Face à Gaia’, which tries to explore what it means to live in the Anthropocene and face ‘Gaia’ – a term
which he borrows from Isabelle Stengers and James Lovelock’s the Gaia Hypothesis. He often calls himself a
disciple of John Dewey, the great American pragmatist.
Currently, Latour is
the director of médialab at Sciences Po, Paris, and professor-at-large for five
years at Cornell University. In this exclusive interview with one of his
students, Gaurav Daga, Latour discusses the challenges India faces in terms of
identity politics, ecological mutation, and the philosophy of pragmatism.
Gaurav Daga: I want to start this interview by asking
a few questions on identity politics. John Dewey and his student, B.R.
Ambedkar, were great fans of the French motto – liberty, equality and
fraternity. They believed that these ideals would bring ‘social endosmosis’.
These ideals are even inscribed in the Indian constitution. But the
unprecedented change in the Earth systems, that is, the great acceleration and
the rise of neo-Hindus, socially and politically, challenges these ideals.
Therefore, how can we construct new imaginaries and narratives in this context?
Bruno Latour: I don’t think identity politics is
specific to Indians. I think it is everywhere. The BJP is one case [of religion-based
identity politics], but in France we have a similar movement towards identity
politics. We have the same in the USA with Trump and Sanders, or in Poland. It
is of course very striking for observers that even Hinduism, which was never a
religion associated with the European tradition of political theology, has been
absorbed by this tradition and reinvented as a political theology, just like
Islam or Christianity in Europe. So in a way, the more the BJP has brought
religion into the Indian polity, the less Indian it is. The BJP has succeeded
in banalising or losing some of the process and originality of Hinduism.
It was not in the nature of the religion to tempt its followers to form an
identity group and then associate with the state.
The loss of
originality of India in that respect is very unfortunate, but it is quite
understandable because few resist the disappearance of politics and its
replacement by identity politics. When Dewey was speaking of politics, he was
saying something completely different, which was pragmatism. For him, politics
was issue-based and consequences based, and had nothing to do with identity.
GD: In your recent exhibition on the ‘Reset Modernity’ at
ZKM Karlsruhe, one of the procedures you propose to follow is by becoming
‘secular at last’. You argue that religion and politics have the potential to
unleash enormous energy, but one needs to be careful when mixing the two. Do
you think, Jan Asmann’s tables
of translation, is one way to shift from names to agencies, and
becoming ‘secular at last’ since politics is being replaced by identity
politics, for good and bad reasons?
BL: Well, ‘secular at last’ is not a good term. I
will say that in English, the word ‘mundane’ or ‘earthly’ is better. It’s a
very complicated question because we have no idea of what politics is nowadays
if it is not linked to political theology, which was not the case with Dewey if
I come back to the first question. Dewey had a secular, mundane, issue-based,
pragmatist definition of politics as a normal activity. Everybody now believes
that politics is something which is beyond the everyday, oriented towards
modernisation, a turn towards the globe. India is interesting because
simultaneously you have a complete transformation of the Indian local politics
into a global horizon, which is basically modernisation. And simultaneously, as
everywhere else, you have backlash – which says we don’t want globalisation, we
are Indian. We invent an identity, which is a paradox of this reaction. But
everywhere it is the same. If you are Polish, Indian, American, French or
English all react in the same way – Identity defines us. Everybody is defined
by identity and there is no difference anymore.
GD: Is this also linked to the argument you make in ‘Face à Gaia’, and more recently, in your Le Monde article of
January 2016 and the Mosse
lecture at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, where you argue that we are back
to the age of discovery, which is not a 16th century case of spatial extension
or ‘plus ultra’ but ‘plus intra’, a geostorical extension. You develop the idea
of a third pole, ‘new attachments’ as a way of moving away from the old poles
of ‘imagined globe’ and ‘imagined land’.
BL: Well, I’m not a political scientist, but as
someone interested in ecological mutation, I think the reason why people have
so much difficulty in identity politics versus pragmatist politics is largely
because the horizon of the globe can mobilise people only if it has no content,
if it is completely empty – a horizon. It’s not a real globe. It’s literally a
utopia, in an etymological sense. It’s nowhere. Now people react to that. They
feel they are sent back and therefore adopt ethnicity and identity. For me, the
reaction to this feeling which people very easily have, especially now after
the ecological crisis, is that it is impossible to land on the globe because
it’s a utopia – not a real place. So it is as if one is in a plane, which is going
somewhere, except there is no place to land. And it doesn’t require great
imagination, when you are in a country like India of one and a half billion
people arriving late in the problem of American-type-development that the
promise of this horizon is nowhere and will never materialise. So we are in a
sort of cargo cult. I don’t know if you know about cargo cults.
GD: No, I don’t.
BL: It’s a very interesting type of religion. And now we suddenly
realise that this thing is impossible. My hunch, which is no more than a hunch,
is that we need to define different access to the land, to the soil, to the
territory which makes a lot of sense for people in India, because you still
have a population on the land. This doesn’t mean going back to the land,
because the land has to be developed, but it means interpreting and
understanding what the land or the soil is made of very differently. So it’s
not a land which is surveyed by geography or surveyors. It is not a land
appropriated by the law. It is a land which has some of the characters of the
country side – territoire – as we say in French, and some of
the elements of hi-tech modernisation. But it is very hard to visualise this new
land because it doesn’t fit into the archaic versus modernisation model. Which
is why I call it Gaia and it has some properties, which were very different
from the old countryside of land, or the globe. This is what I have tried to
convey in a little triangle.
GD: But I’m still trying to figure out how
shall one compose Gè or Gaia-politics? Or ways in which we can make that shift
in terms of everyday politics?
BL: [laughs] That I don’t know. But for me,
the connection between Dewey and ecological politics is important. Dewey at
that time was trying to envisage not identity politics, but politics as modus
vivendi and issue-based politics. Disagreements are absolutely possible. There
is no one identity possible. Every issue has a public. We produce consequences
which are badly understood. So we fumble collectively in the dark.
But importantly,
politics has nothing messianic about it nor does it involve bringing
extraordinary things, and absolutely important for India, it has to be as
uncorrupted as possible. Because that’s the only way to explore the unintended
consequences of actions. Then linked to this question of what I call mundane
politics is the question of ecological mutation. Territories are made of a lot
of other entities than humans, which is not something which would surprise
someone literate in Indian culture. It has nothing to do with the BJP myth
about identity. And probably not something which is modern, in the sense that
it is land freed from all its activities, values, rituals, presence. So in a
way, it will have aspects of older land, the one we have left behind – which
could be called archaic but also aspects of hi-tech, which could make a new
composition. So it is a new land.
It is completely
absurd for an Indian politician to say we cannot develop because we arrived
late. But I think it makes sense to say that the land which you left for the
globe will also not be there either. So we have now to reinvent and reselect
from our old habits and discover new ones. They might orient progressive
politics, but it is very difficult to invent a new progressive politics which
is not directed towards the globe.
GD: But toward Gaia-politics?
BL: Yes. Gaia or I don’t know how to call it.
GD: Might this also be linked to different entities
coming together and talking about knowledge and translation? Because what a
farmer might possess may not be possessed by a scientist. Therefore, in a
certain sense, knowledge at a marginal level can contribute to the dominant
narrative and imagination?
BL: For me, it’s not a question of values but a
question of defining the territory in which we want to land. This is what I
call the third attractor, because it’s very difficult to sort out. I mean, the
example of agriculture is a complicated case in India. It is obvious that
agriculture cannot be archaic (in the sense of traditional). It has to be
modernised. It has to be transformed. It has to be hi-tech. But the question is
what you select [from the existing practices]. The case around genetically
modified organism (GMOs) in India is a nice example. So are the issues around
water disputes or dam disputes or forest disputes.
Now, when there is a
ministry in India which tries to shortcut those debates by saying ‘we should
modernise and avoid this discussion’, it is wrong. It doesn’t mean we have to
stay backward but the negotiations should start on how to go about this. People
know they have to live in a land which will never be global for which the
modernisers are asking them to sacrifice. The modernisers are extending cities
and destroying vast amount of resources, the land, the soil in which people
live. It is as if Indians were being asked to move out of their country and to
move to another country, which is called the globe. Few can or will.
As a
policy for one and a half billion people, you know that this globe is simply
not available (in terms of resources etc.). So people feel that. They feel that
there is a sort of lie in this modernisation. But no one tells them any other
counter truth, so to speak. And another lie is telling them to stay as they are
or go back to what they were, which is in fact a completely reinvented
identity. It is very clear in India. The BJP is inventing a whole past, which
is a complete fiction. So you have one fiction, which is globalisation and
another fiction involving a reinvention of the archaism, when it was never that
way in practice. Therefore, it is pretty normal that people are worried. They
cannot move either way.
GD: It is a situation where you don’t know
which way to go, because every action will have serious consequences. Like the
‘Angel of Geostory’ video by Stefany
Ganachaud, which you directed, where the dancer is fleeing backwards seeing the
catastrophe but when she turns around, she sees things and she is horrified,
and doesn’t know what to do.
BL: Now I will revise my dancer’s movement a
little bit. She was moving away. But what we see arriving in front of us – Gaia
– is also a different land. It defines the land differently. This is what I’m
trying to work out [laughs]. It has some qualities of the world, the globe. But
it also has other virtues, one of them is protection. You cannot ask people to
abandon their protection for the so-called infinite horizon of the global,
where no one lives or ever lived. So in a way the eruption of ecological crisis
is a great chance to think about the multi-folded challenge. It seems to me
that the little I know about Indian culture, that if only India could rely on
its own culture and not feed on the BJP’s invention of identity, it would not
be so disconnected with the question of ecology. India knew what it was to be
on the land.
GD: Right. The last question I want to ask
you, as a disciple of John Dewey, is how you would define pragmatism in this
new context of the Anthropocene or Gaia-politics?
BL: I don’t think Dewey would have been
extremely surprised by the Anthropocene. He would have seen the Anthropocene
straightforwardly, as an extreme case of the consequences of our actions, going
back to you and forcing you to modify everything you used to do. Dewey was a
consequentialist in the theory of politics. The Anthropocene is sort of the
ultimate consequence of our actions. He would have said, well we now have to
build the ‘Great Community’, as he said in ‘The Public and its Problems’. And
he, of course, would have diagnosed, as I do, that to make a public at the same
size as the climate consequence of our action, is a nightmare. But he would not
have been surprised.
Pragmatism is built on
pragmata, on things, ‘matters of concern’, as I say. And the Anthropocene is a
matter of concern around which a public has to be assembled. The problem, in my
view, is that politics has disappeared. Politics is not identity politics.
Identity is something else, which has to be produced with other anthropological
resources. We are talking about psychology, religion or maybe fiction, but we
are not talking about politics. To use the terms of AIME, we are not talking
politically.
GD: Could you elaborate a little further?
BL: The catastrophe is that everywhere at the
moment people have stopped doing politics, because they are simply expressing
their values. For Dewey, the habits of politics were arriving at a modus
vivendi, through secular, mundane negotiations. The problem is that people have
lost the ability to speak politically for two reasons. One of them is that they
have been asked not to speak because of moral dictates, which happened in
Europe.
It happened recently
in Austria. People say things they were not allowed to say before, which means
they had been silenced by moralism. They were pre-emptively forbidden to say
things. Now they say things but they are not political things. They are moral
things. How can you do politics if people have values? It’s impossible. You
have values against values? That’s not politics. It’s a juxtaposition of
indifferent strangers.
GD: So to do politics in Dewey’s sense, would
be object oriented democracy?
BL: Yes, you turn around things. Each thing
has a different interest, a different range of people. But this doesn’t mean
it’s easy to do.
GD: Thank you
