Earthlings Against Latour!

The horizon of this essay could be described as the possibility or otherwise of militant, partisan mobilisation on the basis of an egalitarian commitment extended beyond the form of life we call human. So, let’s start with two slogans. First: ‘We are not defending nature: we are nature defending itself!’ From Paris in 2015 and Brussels in 2016, to the French ZADists and Greta Thunberg’s school strikes, the human activists making this claim are rejecting the hierarchy implied even by the role of guardian and identifying themselves as acting, not on behalf of, but from within a broad ecological continuum.¹ The wager of this identification is well captured in my second slogan, particularly popular during the school strikes: ‘Like the sea level we rise!’ The wager is here compressed into the space of that simile: what would it mean to model protest on the planet’s rising sea levels? Rhetorically, this is so much metaphorical semantic slippage, condensing a purely statistical increase and political insurrection; its identification is also in a way incoherent, inasmuch as the second term – ‘our’ uprising – is effectively opposing the first – rising sea levels – or at least, opposing its causes and hoping thereby to bring it to an end. But are these slogans incoherent in a more fundamental way? Can human climate militants meaningfully claim to be acting like, with, or as, a continuum of non-human and human beings?

To exacerbate the stakes of the wager, we could reverse the terms of this question: can they meaningfully claim not to be doing this? One divides into two: now we have a polarisation, and a political decision to make. Do we want to reserve meaningful agency for human beings, precisely in order to underpin action in the face of ecological emergency? Or do we want to see this belief in human exceptionality as itself a factor in producing this emergency, and so expand our sense of meaningful agency to embrace the conjoint action of all manner of beings? The first of these positions has no difficulty articulating its translation into politics, political action itself having invariably been defined as a subset of the agency proper only to human beings, on the basis of various capacities thought to belong uniquely to these beings (or to some of them, at least). Rejecting this, the second has a much harder time formulating its conception of agency in sharply political terms; with the capacity for decisive intervention having been claimed by the exceptionalists, it stands accused of lacking a conception of political agency that would be both coherent and effective.

To put my cards on the table: I am wholly sympathetic to the second of these positions, notably as developed in the work of Jane Bennett and, especially, Bruno Latour. I find its expanded accounts of agency descriptively convincing, and its rejection of human exceptionalism ethically valuable and motivating. It is clear, though, that more needs to be done to secure the translation of this position into a version of political agency compatible with prescriptive mobilisation and decisive intervention. So what I will be exploring here is the possibility of squaring this circle: is there a way of keeping an ontologically expanded conception of agency while sharpening its political effectivity? Although Bennett’s work, along with that of William E. Connolly, also deserves detailed consideration as part of this exploration, for reasons of space this article concentrates on Latour.² Specifically, in the first part of the paper I present a critical analysis of Latour’s account of the confrontations that characterise the Anthropocene (itself understood as an era that poses the precise question of the relation between human and non-human agency). If Latour consciously mobilises the language of war to describe these confrontations, I argue that his writings repeatedly fail to address the conflicts he invokes, and that this failure results from his refusal to admit forceful confrontation into his otherwise excellent model of agency as distributed across alliances of human and nonhuman actors. After considering other recent models of geo-political agency, I conclude by proposing an understanding of political agency as both decisive and ontologically distributed: as not only ecologically plural, but also robust enough to fight for this plurality in the conflicts of the Anthropocene.

Latour’s Unthinkable War

Although I will here be critical of what I see as a major weakness in his thinking, I will nonetheless be taking Latour’s fundamental insight as axiomatic. That is, I wholeheartedly subscribe to his reorientation of the concept of agency away from the exceptional sovereignty guaranteed by human conscious intentionality and towards the conjoint activity of disparate actors in contingent alliances. From his early work in Science and Technology Studies, Latour developed what became the famous Actor-Network Theory, in which agency is understood not as the inherent property of this or that kind of being, but as an emergent feature of heterogeneous alliances composed of various human and nonhuman, animate and inanimate participants. Latourian agency is thus hybrid, or, in the term I will be preferring here, distributed agency. As he writes in Reassembling the Social:

When we act, who else is acting? How many agents are also present?

[…]

Action is not done under the full control of consciousness; action should rather be felt as a node, a knot, and a conglomerate of many surprising sets of agencies that have to be slowly disentangled.

[…]

By definition, action is dislocated. Action is borrowed, distributed, suggested, influenced, dominated, betrayed, translated.³

The human claim to exclusive possession of meaningful agency – however finessed at the margins by its gracious extension to other beings – rests for Latour on a fantasy of ontological transcendence installed by what he calls the ‘Great Divide’, or the ‘Modern Constitution’, in which human activity defined itself as an exceptional kingdom of ends, a realm of autonomy exempted from the rule-bound kingdom of means now called ‘nature’, this latter thereby defined as pure exteriority and exploitable resource.⁴ This bad exceptionalist dream is aligned for Latour with modern political assertions of some transcendent principle by which any action, however destructive, may be justified: ecological disaster and the Terror are for him both the expression of a misguided attachment to transcendence.⁵ For Latour, then, it is imperative that human beings should not conceive of their action in terms of confrontation, upheaval, rupture: in his view, this is precisely what has produced the present sorry state of affairs. Instead, we should understand our activity as dependent on such contingent alliances as we may manage to form with various other actors. The ontological egalitarianism of Latour’s distributed agency thus commits him to a patient politics of negotiation, discussion, and compromise: while conflict sits at one end of this spectrum, all of Latour’s focus is on the complex processes of mutual presentation through which beings enter into, maintain, and leave their enabling alliances.⁶

This account of agency has found considerable traction as a way of understanding the era of human activity as defining geophysical force that is indicated by the more or less accepted term of the ‘Anthropocene’. Despite this, it must be said, the bulk of the arguments around agency in the Anthropocene have shown little or no interest in considering agency as distributed: taking their lead from the concept’s etymology, they have remained firmly anthropocentric. For example, critics including Andreas Malm and Razmig Keucheyan line up to dispute Dipesh Chakrabarty’s claim that anthropogenic climate change problematically shifts the subject of history from recognisable actors such as classes to the human species as such, and argue that responsibility should be attributed instead to the agents of fossil-fuel-driven capitalism: the two sides fundamentally agree, however, that the relevant actors are, exclusively, human beings.⁷ Indeed, in his recent The Progress of This Storm, Malm argues – explicitly against the notion of distributed agency – that only by embracing the exceptional capacity of human beings to act on the realm of ‘nature’ (understood via the analytical lens of historical materialism) will it be possible to mobilise effectively against climate disaster.⁸

As we might expect, Latour’s approach to what in a 2014 essay he calls ‘Agency at the Time of the Anthropocene’ rejects this human exceptionalism, in favour of complex mutual imbrication.⁹ In his analysis, this term signals not the exceptional status of human beings as geological actors, but the simultaneous emergence of the earth as political actor and of human activity as inextricably entwined with that of the multiple other beings inhabiting this earth, as well as with that of the earth itself.¹⁰ Nonetheless, Latour’s account of this era, and of the kinds of agency it might be thought to require, makes some moves that his regular readers might find surprising. For in contrast to his usual emphasis on agential entanglement and advocacy of low-level tinkering, Latour characterises the Anthropocene in terms of polemics and stark antagonisms. In Facing Gaia, high-stakes confrontation is by definition the issue: the face-off signalled in his title pits the human world against the ‘earth’ (which is to say: the worlds of innumerable other beings). More dramatically still, Latour calls this conflict war. By this, he understands two distinct but interrelated conflicts. The first is what has led to the current era being baptised the Anthropocene, namely the war we humans have belatedly realised we have been fighting against all manner of other beings. Latour calls upon Carl Schmitt here, to define war as not just any clash between adversaries, but a confrontation between enemies, with no mediating term, in which the opponent is understood as absolutely foreign and as posing an existential threat. In Latour’s account, the Anthropocene puts a definitive end to our Modern fantasies of ‘Nature’ as pure, exploitable exteriority, and this in turn removes the third term which had always mediated previous conflicts, leaving us everywhere facing the ‘real possibility’ of hostilities.¹¹ The disappearance of our fantasy of ‘Nature’ may nonetheless also play a beneficial role: if there is no longer a ‘state of nature’ to relativise all our conflicts, then at least the warring parties – here, the alliances that call themselves ‘human’, on the one hand, and all those against whom they like to define themselves, on the other – will finally have to answer the questions ‘of life and death’, the imperatives Latour repeatedly presents as the heart of the politics of the Anthropocene: ‘What am I ready to defend? Whom am I ready to sacrifice?’; ‘designate your enemies and delineate the territory you are prepared to defend’.¹²

But this ‘repoliticizing’ of ecology – its reformulation in terms of enmity – is only the first panel of Latour’s portrait of Anthropocenic war.¹³ For these humans are also at war with each other, ranged into ‘climate change deniers’, on the one hand, and on the other, those fighting for serious recognition of the situation. But Latour goes further: in his terms, these opposing camps comprise those still wanting to call themselves ‘Humans’ (thereby laying claim to the exceptional ontological transcendence that justifies their ongoing exploitation of all other beings), and those striving to align their interests with those of the other inhabitants of the earth, whom Latour variously calls ‘Earthbound’, ‘Terrans’ (in Facing Gaia), ‘Terrestrials’ (in Down to Earth), or, in the term I’m adopting here, ‘Earthlings’.¹⁴ This intensification of the state of war does not, however, change the imperatives: Latour continues to insist on the importance of open declarations of war aims and of allegiances, and the same questions return. The challenge to the deniers (the ‘Humans’) will be:

list all those beings, those agencies you say you can do without. We will do ours. Then we will draw the territories that are under attack, those that are worth defending, those that could be abandoned. Once this is done, we might compare our chances of losing or of winning.¹⁵

If these are the same questions that are, for Latour, at issue in the first version of Anthropocenic war, the difference here is that in this case we already have some idea of what the answers might be. For ‘our opponents are more attuned to what is at stake, better versed in what the words ‘possession’ and ‘defense of one’s possessions’ mean. They, our adversaries, mobilized long ago’.¹⁶

The language of ‘war’ has moved in and out of Latour’s writings over the years. It is very present in his early work – one of his first books was after all entitled Les Microbes: Guerre et paix – where it sits at one end of what Latour presents as the spectrum of negotiation. Then it fades (having been widely criticised for its macho leanings), before returning with a vengeance in Facing Gaia as the baseline definition of the strife generated by the vast destruction human beings continue to wreak. And yet Latourian ‘war’ is never quite what we might expect. If Latour repeatedly describes the ‘Humans’ as engaged in a ‘land grab’, for instance, his insistence on their aggressive, acquisitive tactics sits oddly with his account of the clash of which these are supposedly a part.¹⁷ For, as we have seen, the conflict Latour envisages is essentially discursive. Mediated through a shared language, the face-to-face takes place not in fact between Schmittian enemies, but between adversaries: as this suggests, it is essentially a form of negotiation, producing a verbal challenge, then consideration of comparative positions, and then… not conflict, but the possibility of peace talks. In Chantal Mouffe’s terms, this puts us in the realm of agonism – disagreement between adversaries, mediated by acceptance of a common discursive ground – rather than the antagonism – unmediated conflict between enemies, with no common ground – that Latour rightly invokes but cannot sustain as the dynamic of climate conflict.¹⁸ Repeatedly, Latour summons the image of conflict, before speeding ahead to the discursive negotiations between the allegedly incommensurable parties, or proposing the terms on which – despite supposedly being at war – they might prepare for or pursue their ongoing negotiations. Blink, and you miss it: as bloody strife is invoked but not dwelt on, all the emphasis gathers on the preliminary declarations and the eventual peace talks. War is reduced to the most ephemeral of existences, simultaneously invoked and suspended, or sandwiched fleetingly and reluctantly as the discursive transition between two regimes of peace: ‘from a regime of apparent peace to a regime of possible peace. Between the two, it’s true, there’s no point pretending otherwise, we have to agree to talk about war’.¹⁹

The language of war hypes up this sense that there is no alternative; but all this turns out to mean is that we will indeed have to use this language. Reading Latour on climate change, we navigate this circle time after time, sent round to the pole of violent conflict, only to be redirected to the pole of discourse. Thus, in Down to Earth, although the war in question is supposedly already underway (it has already been both declared and triggered), it somehow also becomes – impossibly – a war about where this war itself will be fought:

By pulling out of the Paris Accord, Trump explicitly triggered, if not a world war, at least a war over what constitutes the theater of operations. ‘We Americans don’t belong to the same earth as you. Yours may be threatened; ours won’t be!’²⁰

Despite having been ‘triggered’, this supposed war next emerges as only speculatively a matter of armed conflict, as Latour suspends its military dimension in the realm of the hypothetical:

The political consequences, and presumably the military consequences – or in any case the existential consequences – of what the first President Bush had predicted in 1992, in Rio, have thus been spelled out: ‘Our way of life is not negotiable!’²¹

So this is politics, not war. As a declaration of what will and what will not count as matters for discussion, it sits plum in the middle of Latour’s spectrum of negotiation. For Latour, in fact, being in a state of war ‘doesn’t necessarily mean that we are going to fight’ – which is, to put it mildly, a curious definition!²² As if aware of the problems created by his inconsistent use of the term, late in Down to Earth Latour tries to pin the blame on the nature of the war in question: ‘We are at last clearly in a situation of war’, he writes, ‘but it is a phony war, at once declared and latent’.²³ Unfortunately, this move succeeds only in emphasising that the only war Latour can envisage is war of the phony kind. Time and again, Latour either slips backwards (replacing being in a state of war with choosing a side in the war to come), suspends as merely imminent the war he also suggests is currently under way (by characterising the situation instead as one of ongoing negotiation), or rushes forwards (towards the peace talks). War in Latour is so rapidly elided that one wonders why he uses the term at all, given how uncomfortably it sits with his usual emphasis on politics as piecemeal, low-level tinkering, the patient and fragile construction of alliances. The answer to this would seem to be that it allows him to mark the gravity of the situation, defined as it is by starkly violent forms of antagonism. His almost instant elision of the reality of such conflict, however, provokes two conclusions. First: although Latour knows that Schmittian existential conflict is the state of affairs, he wants to encourage us towards negotiation. While this is of course a worthy goal, it leaves Latour invoking a level of conflict he cannot bring himself to envisage. Whence the second conclusion: although he knows he needs to, Latour just cannot think the reality of such stark conflict. The reasons for this are deep: they are found in his decision to reject drastically interruptive action as relying on a principle of transcendence which makes it of a piece with the human exceptionalist claim to ontological transcendence. The irony is, however, that this allergy to anything resembling strong transcendence leaves Latour unable to conceptualise the conflict to which he better than anyone has shown that disastrous claim to lead.

Contrary to Latour’s gloss on George H.W. Bush’s comments in Rio, there is nothing speculative about this conflict; we have no need to ‘presume’ in order to imagine its military dimension. That climate conflict is both real and authentically militarised is demonstrated by countless contemporary cases. The US military accounts for 80 % of the federal government’s total fuel usage (while being exempt from measures to track or reduce carbon emissions); militias receive international funding to intercept refugees displaced by climate and civil war, whose people-smuggling they are simultaneously managing; currently ongoing military activity already serves the geopolitical purpose of securing the short-term future of finance capitalism, along with its resource-intensive, fossil-fuel-driven consumerist front, in the context of drastic climate instability (not least by profiteering from this instability).²⁴ And of course, Latour knows this, and is seeking to address exactly this situation. In Down to Earth, for instance, he writes of ‘millions of people […] who are driven by the cumulative action of wars, failed attempts at economic development, and climate change, to search for territory they and their children can inhabit’.²⁵ My point, then, is not that Latour is unaware of the reality of these contemporary conflicts. My point, rather, is that he is unable to think this reality; and that this inability results from what he takes to be the consequences of his account of agency as distributed.

My aim here, accordingly, is to take Latour’s description of the battle-lines that define our time, and build on this a more adequate account of Anthropocenic agency as both distributed across ontologically diverse actors and confrontationally conflictual. Discursive identification will not short-circuit violence into discussion; and sacrifice is a question not of notional alignment, but of currently enacted policy. We have become only too familiar with ‘fossil fuel sacrifice zones’, from the Niger Delta to the Marshall Islands to the Alberta tar sands, where an unchanging environmental racism sees forms of human and nonhuman life discarded as negligible externalities, and a new frontierist extractivism scratches profits from the tapering seams of what Jason W. Moore calls the myth of ‘cheap nature’.²⁶ As Sudanese diplomat Lumumba Di-Aping most dramatically pointed out (at the United Nations Climate Conference in Copenhagen (COP 15) in December 2009), sacrificial climate politics is already a fact: in being asked during those negotiations to agree to a global average increase in temperature of 2 degrees, many African nations were being asked to accept a rise of 3.5 degrees, and so to embrace their own sacrifice for the sake of economic business as usual. In Lumumba’s words, ‘We have been asked to sign a suicide pact’, which would legitimise ‘climate genocide’.²⁷ Or in the words of Mary Ann Lucille Sering, climate change secretary for the Philippines, to the 2013 COP 19 summit in Warsaw: ‘I am beginning to feel like we are negotiating on who is to live and who is to die’.²⁸ Negotiations, yes: not after conflict, though, let alone in its stead, but rather as already, actively and fatally, antagonistic; negotiations as already ‘a crime scene’, already the theatre of climate conflict.²⁹ In both the specifically military sense, and the broader sense of a conflict over ecology whose stakes are existential negation (and mostly in both senses at once), war is already here. In this context, if we decide not to follow the human exceptionalists and simply reject Latour’s vision of distributed agency, can we instead develop this vision so that, rather than fast-forwarding past this antagonism, it might help us mobilise within it?

Antagonistic Arrays

To help us on the way to such a development, I propose now to invoke the work of the consulting research agency Forensic Architecture, established in 2011 at the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London. When theorising their activity, Forensic Architecture have consistently drawn on models of distributed agency and antagonistic alliances, both in the situations they address and in their own practice. Moreover, their writings habitually situate their analyses in the context of the conflicts generated and exacerbated by climate change. I will focus in particular on the work they undertook to highlight and challenge the deadly effects of the security regime policing attempts by illegalised migrants to cross the Mediterranean from North Africa into Europe. As two alliances of human and nonhuman actors confront each other – that regime on the one hand, its critics on the other – what we discover, I hope to show, is that distributed agency proves wholly compatible with decisive, confrontational intervention.

In March 2011, 72 sub-Saharan migrants left Tripoli by boat for the island of Lampedusa. Their vessel ran out of fuel and drifted for fourteen days, during which time the migrants had no food or water. All but nine of the migrants ultimately died. Over the course of their ordeal, they had contact with various other occupants of the maritime space in question (which in addition to fishing vessels was heavily populated by military ships and aircraft enforcing an embargo on Libya during its civil conflict). Despite the variously-recognised obligation to come to the aid of those in distress at sea, none of these others intervened; the case became known as that of the ‘left-to-die’ boat.³⁰

Forensic Architecture produced a report on this case in support of the coalition of NGOs formed to establish accountability for these 63 deaths. Significant for my purposes is that in the work which provided the basis of this report, Forensic Architecture insist that such accountability can only be established by an approach that understands agency as both distributed and conflictual. Maritime governance in the Mediterranean, they claim, is marked by ‘a form of violence that is diffused and dispersed among many actors and which often, as in the case we have investigated, operates less through the direct action of a singular actor than through the interaction of many’.³¹ In this case, governments, the European Union, maritime law, the military, surveillance technology, civil conflict, poverty, and the Mediterranean itself form an array whose composite action issues in death. ‘The image of the Mediterranean that emerges’, the authors conclude,

is that of an environment crisscrossed by ‘a thick fabric of complex relations, associations, and chains of actions between people, environments, and artifices’. It is the totality of this field of forces that constitutes the particular form of governance that operates at sea.³²

It is the ‘totality of [the] field of forces’ which acts; as in Latour’s core scenario of distributed agency, actors become effective by allying themselves with, or indeed conscripting, other actors. The geopower of the sea is not a quality inherent to it, but an emergent property of the alliance into which it finds itself conscripted: here, an alliance which ‘turned the sea into a deadly liquid’.³³

Against this alliance, the researchers of Forensic Architecture mobilise another. Forensics is itself already the activity of conjoint human and nohuman actors, as Eyal Weizman (the presiding genius of the venture) explains:

Forensic speech is traditionally undertaken as a relation between three elements: an object or building ‘made to speak’, an expert who functions as the translator from the language of objects to that of people, and the forum or assembly in which such claims can be made.³⁴

The work of Forensic Architecture thus entails ventriloquising nonhuman witnesses – although we should note that this is not solely (indeed, is perhaps decreasingly) the work of human experts, but is also undertaken by those technological agents (cameras, software, ultraviolet light, and so on) through which these witnesses deliver their testimony. In the case of the ‘left-to-die’ boat, the researchers mobilised ‘an unorthodox assemblage of human and nonhuman testimony’, in which the sea emerged as ‘a vast and extended sensorium, a sort of digital archive that [could] be interrogated and cross-examined as a witness’.³⁵ Elsewhere, in work on the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill of 2011,

Science is […] called into court to interrogate the opaque testimony that was gradually recorded in soil transformations, the earth samples functioning as a model of an entire socio-ecological dynamic constructed over decades. The mud registers the historical agency of multiple forces and actors – the impact of the technology used to extract oil, the negligence of state institutions and corporations, the misfortune of migrant peasants, and indigenous communities, wildlife refugees, polluted water streams, and contaminated atmospheres – out of which a complex political history can be narrated.³⁶

Mud appears in court as a nonhuman witness, ‘interrogated’ not by lawyers alone, but by lawyers working with (or against) frameworks of scientific interpretation. In this model, if ‘ecological systems inhabit the courtrooms of national and transnational forums as potential witnesses’, we should nevertheless guard against the temptation to see such participation as a free-for-all, in which the capacities of particular actors are dissolved in an amalgam of infinite exchangeability.³⁷ To claim that no actor is effective alone, outside of this or that alliance, is not to claim that capacities are indifferently distributed across alliances. By itself, mud makes no claim to meaning; without the action of the mud as historical record, however, the claims of its interpreters are empty. The sea alone is not responsible for the death of 63 illegalised migrants; without the sea, however, the governmental security array must find alternative participants if it is to be effective. And this is perfectly clear from the work of Forensic Architecture, which documents its own conscription of different actors into alliances mobilised to confront the actions of this array.

Antagonistic alliances thus confront one another. But the alignments can be more complicated than this. As we have seen, Latour claims that the Anthropocene divides the inhabitants of the Earth into two nested pairs: human beings vs the rest, and, within the human beings, Humans vs Terrans. As Déborah Danowski and Eduardo Vivieros de Castro point out, however, if agency is indeed distributed across arrays of human and nonhuman actors, then ‘the division between Humans and Terrans is not only internal to our species’, but:

opposes two camps or sides populated by humans and nonhumans – micro-organisms, animals, plants, machines, rivers, glaciers, oceans, chemical elements, and compounds. In short, the whole range of existents that find themselves implicated in the advent of the Anthropocene […].³⁸

With the battle lines configured in this way, the debates we saw above over species-level responsibility for climate change can look like so many local skirmishes. For in those debates, there is no question that human agency is the issue: the only questions are whether this agency is that of all humans taken as a species (and if so, how this should be exercised), or only some. By contrast, Jason W. Moore’s theorisation of what he terms the ‘Capitalocene’ manages both to sustain an incisive critique of capitalism as ecologically devastating and to conceptualise agency along the lines of the antagonistic human-nonhuman alliances sketched by Danowski and Vivieros de Castro. ‘Relations of class, capital, and empire are already bundled with extra-human natures’, writes Moore: ‘they are configurations of human and extra-human natures. From this it follows that agency is a relational property of specific bundles of human and extra-human nature’.³⁹ Building on Moore and Danowski and Vivieros de Castro, I want to suggest that strong confrontation is quite compatible with distributed agency. Division divides, fractally and fractiously: not just humans against humans, or indeed Humans against Terrans, or humans against the rest, but composite against composite, alliance against alliance, on each side.

As I will now argue, this field of conflict is dynamically organised by the relations of force obtaining within and between ontologically composite alliances, relations of conscription, instrumentalisation, fidelity, infection, solidarity, existential negation: of imbrication and fully-frontal antagonism. In what Nigel Clark and Kathryn Yusoff call ‘the geologization of the political’,⁴⁰ action is conjoint but no less conflictual, and hierarchies of scale (or of part and whole) can implode: earth and ocean, trawler net, whale, and microbead, rainforest, logging company, and biofuel pursue their struggles equally across a field in which, for that very reason, power differentials multiply.⁴¹ Duly qualified, Latour proves helpful here: describing the new geo-politics as ‘the addition of powerful forces of resistance thrust into the class conflicts and capable of transforming their stakes’, he affirms that ‘[t]he outcome of the disputes can only be modified if all rebels, in overlapping configurations, are entrusted with the task of fighting’.⁴² As a result, ‘we are going to be able to multiply the sources of revolt against injustice, and, consequently, to increase considerably the gamut of potential allies in the struggles to come for the Terrestrial’: ‘From now on, we benefit, so to speak, from help offered by unleashed agents’.⁴³ If we subtract what we now know to be Latour’s habitual displacement of the conflict (here, from the present to the near future), we are left with a very useful model, in which the agency of the various combative alliances can be understood as the joint mobilisation of the capacities of all manner of ‘unleashed agents’. Let us see what this might look like.

In his Carbon Democracy, Timothy Mitchell provides an outstanding account of such agency in his interpretation of the connections between fossil fuels and the forms of political power and geopolitical conflict that have defined the industrial era.⁴⁴ Mostly, Mitchell follows a classically Latourian line, emphasising that actors we might think of as drawing up and implementing plans for rapacious domination have usually in fact been improvising strategies to shore up their vulnerable position. At one point, however, Mitchell goes beyond this emphasis on the weakness of the apparently powerful, and shows how confrontational political intervention can emerge from particular configurations of human and nonhuman actors. Discussing the successes of the labour movement in North America and Europe between the late-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, he analyses the contribution made by the dominant methods for extracting and distributing coal to the vanguardist power of mining unions. Vulnerability is again key – but in this case, it is the vulnerability of industrial processes as a whole, created by the combination of their dependence on coal and the infrastructure of its distribution via concentrated channels susceptible to interruption by intervention at a single well-chosen point. To this, Mitchell adds the topography of labour organisation: working underground and amongst themselves, miners were able not only to build solidarity, but crucially, to organise away from the surveillance of their employers. Mitchell thus understands the power accrued by mining unions in this period as an emergent property, ‘a new form of collective capability built out of coalmines, railways, power stations, and their operators’.⁴⁵ Each element of which is of course susceptible to further Latourian parsing: for ‘coalmines’, say, we need also to understand coal, wood, capital, steel, muscle (human and equine, at least where horses, donkeys, and ponies replace or accompany women and children as mineworkers), not to mention the overwhelmingly female labour of social reproduction by which the work of the mine is sustained. Across the array, capacities are relationally constituted and differentially distributed. Alliances clash and combine: and when it combines with others that amplify its power (the wider labour movement and its channels of communication, public transport, etc), from the array of actors we call ‘coal mining’ there grows the interruptive force of the general strike, the quintessential image of confrontational workers’ mobilisation landing a decisive blow in the class struggle.⁴⁶

We should remember, though, that such agency is not necessarily on one side or the other of any given confrontation. Mitchell contrasts the affordances of the mining industry for labour power with the governmental politics and distribution infrastructure of the oil industry, which he reads as inimical to workers’ power and as maximising companies’ control over the rate and continuity of supply; we can also contrast his description of these affordances with the account given by Andreas Malm of the rise of fossil-fuel capitalism in the conversion by their owners of British textile mills to coal-fired steam power, cheaper and more reliable than water power and human workers.⁴⁷ In these examples (and reading Malm against his human-exceptionalist commitments), we can see how agential power on the other side of the class struggle from Mitchell’s miners is also composed of human and nonhuman capacities: here including those of mineral and topographical participants. And through this, we see again the point made by Danowski and Vivieros de Castro: that a given array can be aligned on both sides of a given conflict. The array we have been calling ‘coal mining’ is recruited by mill-owners to reduce their costs and secure consistent productivity; having become essential in this and many subsequent ways, it can also launch crucial interventions by organised labour. This is the distributed agency version of a classic Marxist insight: the same array finds its emancipatory force within the structure of its current exploitative mobilisation.

In the words of the Invisible Committee: ‘The world doesn’t environ us, it passes through us. What we inhabit inhabits us. What surrounds us constitutes us’.⁴⁸ As Clark and Yusoff write, then, ‘relevant collective action must be understood as being not only about or towards the earth but emerging with or through the earth’.⁴⁹ Decisive action emerges from a whole composite of human and nonhuman elements, without thereby losing anything of that decisive character. On the contrary: it is precisely thanks to this composition that the action emerges as decisive, as it brings into play as the stakes of its intervention the full set of vital relations which give meaning to the existence of all participants.⁵⁰ For a collective situated actually on one side of a struggle and potentially on the other, the difference is a matter of orientation: and if, as our fossil-fuel examples amply demonstrate, this always entails the Latourian question of politics as orientation towards the Earth, this geo-political orientation is also, as Latour knows and as these examples also show, an entry into conflict. The decisive partisan move that shifts this orientation from complicity and exploitation to solidarity and confrontation should be understood not as intervening from without to effect this shift single-handedly, but rather as the actualisation of a tendency already present within the collective. These are familiar arguments in political theory, of course: in this context, their emphasis moves from an exclusively human dialectic of process and will, to the acknowledgement that even what appeared to be a decisive voluntaristic break with an existing regime was possible only thanks to a combination of human and nonhuman forces. Decisive action is the work of the alliance, emerging as the point at which the force of this array becomes politically effective, or the site at which the plane of political action is intersected by this force.

To be clear: I am not arguing that political decisions are made just as well by train tracks and streams as they are by miners and mill-owners. I am, however, arguing that what we think of as the punctual political decision emerges as a decisive intervention thanks to the relations obtaining within its host alliance, without thereby losing anything of its decisive character. The ontological egalitarianism of distributed agency demands not the abolition of differentiation, but the alliance of multiple differentially distributed and inter-reliant capacities, whose distribution is not tied to an unchanging hierarchy of species being, but rather, as an index of relations of domination and emancipation, shifts across time and space to delineate at any given moment the composition of this expanded political field. As Phillip John Usher shows in his recent study, Exterranean, parsing by species is a way to miss the differentials making up the politics of a given field; by contrast, intensifying our understanding of the agential arrays at work brings this politics into more realistic and, perhaps, more effective focus.⁵¹ Marked by what Katherine Hayles calls ‘inflection points at which systemic dynamics can be decisively transformed’, such fields see alliances shift orientation, amplify their force, and apply strategic pressure to confront the dominant regime.⁵² If such fields are necessarily immune to the messianic transcendence of the capital Event, this confrontational articulation nonetheless produces sites of drastic interruption, with decisive stakes, including the question of an orientation to the Earth: it is, in Emily Apter’s phrase, ‘a skein of “eventalness” straddling orders of ecology and cosmogony’, ‘tapping immanent materialities for an eco-physics of democracy’ – and, I would add, of mobilisation and contestation.⁵³

To return to the ecological activists with whom we started, then: we can indeed understand human climate militants as acting with or as a continuum of non-human and human beings – but we can do so because there is no such action otherwise. The Anthropocene did not invent distributed agency – although it has made the denial of its reality less credible, and laid down the task of conceptualising militant activism along these lines. As Latour puts it: ‘class struggles depend on a geo-logic’.⁵⁴ As Latour never quite manages to say, however: the conflict in question is already here. Latour is completely right to affirm the value of a properly realistic new materialism, attuned to the force of all kinds of actor; he is completely wrong to imply that the conflict in which this affirmation is required is either still to come or primarily discursive.⁵⁵ Which, finally, explains my title. Latour is essential here, but only if we supplement his arguments with a functioning account of agency as both distributed and confrontational. And if confrontation has always been the lot of Earthlings, in their various science fiction adventures, the confrontation in which they are now embroiled is emphatically not between Humans and extraterrestrials: it is between all those committed to the widest flourishing of Earthlings of all kinds and those desperate to preserve their Human privileges, even at the price of becoming extraterrestrials themselves. If the expanded account of militant agency I have offered here may, perhaps, be one contribution to the fight against the exceptionalist delusions and brutal politics of class, racial, and species sacrifice underpinning the diminishing returns of extractivism or the interstellar fantasies of the oligarchs, this is precisely because this struggle, whose stakes are indeed existential negation, is currently underway. And in this struggle, this agency, composite and confrontational, is already operative – on both sides.

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Martin Crowley

Martin Crowley is Reader in Modern French Thought and Culture at the University of Cambridge, where he is also Anthony L. Lyster Fellow and Director of Studies in Modern and Medieval Languages at Queens' College. His most recent book, Accidental Agents: Ecological Politics beyond the Human, is forthcoming with Columbia University Press. He serves as General Editor of the journal French Studies. Email: [email protected]

Notes

1 According to Manon Bineau and Antoine Chopot, this slogan – which they formulate as ‘We are nature defending itself against the economy’ – ‘is spreading from one collective to the next with no need for a publicity campaign’ (‘“Nous sommes la nature qui se défend contre l’économie”’, 43). Translations from this excellent article are my own.

2 See especially Bennett, The Enchantment of Modern Life and Vibrant Matter, and Connolly, The Fragility of Things and Facing the Planetary.

3 Latour, Reassembling the Social, 43-46.

4 See Latour, Politics of Nature.

5 See Latour, We Have Never Been Modern.

6 See the programmatic essay, “Irreductions,” included in Latour, The Pasteurization of France.

7 See, respectively, Malm, Fossil Capital; Keucheyan, Nature is a Battlefield; and Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History” and “Climate and Capital.”

8 Malm, The Progress of This Storm.

9 Latour, “Agency at the Time of the Anthropocene.”

10 Latour, Facing Gaia.

11 Latour, Facing Gaia, 237-38.

12 Latour, Facing Gaia, 227, 245.

13 Latour, Facing Gaia, 223.

14 Latour, Facing Gaia, 251 and 248; Down to Earth, 55; “A Plea for the Earthly Sciences,” p. 3 of Latour’s PDF; and “Telling Friends from Foes,” p. 2 of Latour’s PDF. ‘Earthlings’ also has the signal advantage of being the chosen term in Peter Szendy’s magnificent Kant in the Land of Extraterrestrials.

15 Latour, “Telling Friends from Foes,” 11.

16 Latour, “Telling Friends from Foes,” 11.

17 Latour, Facing Gaia, 9.

18 See Mouffe, Agonistics.

19 Latour, Facing Gaia, 226-27.

20 Latour, Down to Earth, 3; see also 84.

21 Latour, Down to Earth, 3.

22 Latour, Facing Gaia, 237, trans. modified.

23 Latour, Down to Earth, 90.

24 See Savage, “The Elephant in the Room;” Tubiana and Warin, “Diary;” Klein, The Shock Doctrine; Loewenstein, Disaster Capitalism.

25 Latour, Down to Earth, 4.

26 Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life.

27 On this, see Forensic Architecture, “Climate Crimes;” Lahoud, “Floating Bodies,” 512-13; and Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate (London: Allen Lane, 2014), 276.

28 Klein, This Changes Everything, 276.

29 Lahoud, “Floating Bodies,” 515.

30 See Heller, Pezzani, and SITU Research, “Case: ‘Left-to-Die Boat’.”

31 Heller and Pezzani, “Liquid Traces,” 659.

32 Heller and Pezzani, “Liquid Traces,” 678. Heller and Pezzani here quote Weizman, Forensic Architecture: Notes from Fields and Forums, 6.

33 Heller and Pezzani, “Liquid Traces,” 673.

34 Weizman, Forensic Architecture: Violence at the Threshold of Detectability, 67.

35 Heller and Pezzani, “Liquid Traces,” 673-74.

36 Tavares, “Nonhuman Rights,” 561.

37 Tavares, “Nonhuman Rights,” 562.

38 Danowski and Vivieros de Castro, The Ends of the World, 100-01.

39 Moore, Capitalism, 37.

40 Clark and Yusoff, “Geosocial Formations,” 17.

41 On climate change as effecting a collapse of scale, see Morton, Hyperobjects. On this collapse as a welcome dismantling of fantasy human transcendence, see Latour, Facing Gaia and Down to Earth.

42 Latour, Down to Earth, 61.

43 Latour, Down to Earth, 88.

44 Mitchell, Carbon Democracy. Latour cites Mitchell approvingly in Down to Earth, 62.

45 Mitchell, Carbon Democracy, 27.

46 Mitchell, Carbon Democracy, 23-25.

47 See Malm, Fossil Capital.

48 The Invisible Committee, To Our Friends, 79.

49 Clark and Yusoff, “Geosocial,” 17.

50 See Bineau and Chopot, 49-51.

51 Usher, Exterranean, 70.

52 Hayles, Unthought, 203.

53 Apter, “Blurring.”

54 Latour, Down to Earth, 62.

55 Latour, Down to Earth, 61.