Farewell: Memo-Realizing Latour's Politics of Dependency

The final text published within Latour's lifetime is a coauthored “memorandum” with his former student Nikolaj Schultz, entitled On the Emergence of an Ecological Class: A Memo (hereafter, Memo). Schultz became Latour's student in 2015, and in 2017 a first publication, an interview of Latour conducted by Schultz, appeared in Danish (Latour and Schultz 2018a), followed by subsequent interviews (Stein Pendersen, Latour, and Schultz 2019; Latour and Schultz 2020, 2022a, 2022b) before publication of the Memo. ¹ The focus of their work was Schultz's development of Latour's concept of “geo-social class”—“I invented the term of geo-social classes, but Nikolaj did the research!” (2019:225)—which first appeared in Latour's Down to Earth (2018). ²

While Latour had long refrained—especially in his earlier and middle works—from directly engaging with some of the traditional axes, concepts, and/or traditions of social and political philosophy—most clearly those of a socialist/Marxist bent—this last text, to the delight of some readers, might appear as Latour's arrival within the engaged world of traditional politics. Indeed, the Memo itself is explicitly addressed to “Members of ecological parties and their present and future electors” (p. iii). With the seemingly uncharacteristic invocation of “class,” of addressing “parties” and “electors,” and with the appearance of both Gramsci (though briefly) and the goal of cultivating “hegemony” by an ecological class for the purposes of “winning the battle of ideas . . . about what the world is made of” (p. 58, emphasis in original), some retrospective consideration of Latour's work is appropriate to situate this last piece within Latour's larger oeuvre. ³

Commentators, critics, and students of Latour's work have long emphasized Latour's affinity with Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes, and Carl Schmitt. To the dismay and suspicion of some, Latour's engagement with and use of these thinkers throughout his works made Latour's location within the political spectrum questionable, most especially when it came to his explicit engagement with “politics” as it has typically been defined, conceived, theorized, and implemented. In Graham Harman's Bruno Latour: Reassembling the Political, Harman “divides” Latour's work into three phases, from his early “love affair with Hobbes,” which “fades abruptly in 1991” (2014:29), followed by his middle phase that takes up “political ecology,” and, finally, to Latour's latter phase, which (explicitly) emerges with his An Inquiry into Modes of Existence, published in 2013.

Latour’s engagement with traditional political philosophy of the right-left political spectrum may appear to have been a more recent foray, but it can be found in the “early period” as well. While Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy (2004) is often identified as Latour's first major explicit engagement with political philosophy as a central theme, in 1998 Latour prepared a paper commissioned by the German Social Democratic Party (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands) and presented at a Friedrich Ebert Foundation (Friedrich Ebert Stiftung) meeting entitled “Ein Ding ist ein Thing—a (Philosophical) Platform for a Left (European) Party”—a surprising title and audience, perhaps, for those who have thought that Latour shunned “traditional” political engagement. While over two and a half decades separate this piece and the Memo, themes that characterize much of Latour's political commentaries and writings in the interim can be found in this earlier piece, most saliently Latour's focus on a “politics of space” rather than one of time—the latter of which has, according to Latour, structured much traditionalist (return), liberal (development), or revolutionary (progress) political thought. ⁴ This earlier piece proposing a “philosophical platform for a Left European party” should help situate the Memo as a continued attempted engagement with traditional left-right political discourse. ⁵

Reading the Memo, for many, may induce a type of vertigo for one of two (or more) reasons: the first has already been suggested, that Latour and Schultz are explicitly addressing political parties and movements using the seeming language of “traditional” political theory, something Latour had long seemingly eschewed; the second has to do with the content and structure of the Memo itself, which may be met with dizzying frustration. In part, this is due to the Memo’s own self-description and the “felicity condition” seemingly imagined. The text is “written in the style of a memo, so you won't find nuances or notes” (p. v) and is broken up into 10 sections comprising 76 total memos followed by a Postface added to the English edition after the initial French publication. The 76 “notes” are reproductions of points and arguments made elsewhere by the authors both separately and together that address the need to think and do politics according to their proposed ecological class.

While identifying that the current configuration of global economic production has produced ecological crises the globe over, the reason for Leftists’ and Liberals’ demoralization and impotence to address said crises, according to Latour and Schultz, is that the metaphysics of Leftists and Liberals for politics is determined by the same orientation as that of the neoliberal and racist/nationalistic Right: namely, economic production. Class theorists—from or built off the Marxist sense—were useful for giving individuals a sense of who they were (proletariat), who their friends were (other workers and/or class traitors from the capitalist class), who their enemies were (capitalists), and what to work toward (workers’ control over the means of production, dictatorship of the proletariat, redistribution of economic gains from the capitalist class to the proletariat). On this point, of providing a schema of contestation within which individuals and groups can locate and orient themselves, “Marx remains an indispensable guide” (p. 9).

A major limitation of traditional class-based politics is, for Latour and Schultz, its anthropocentrism and account of history. Take, for example, the orienting device of the familiar slogan “Workers of the world, unite!” It appears not merely as a rallying cry but also identifies the ontological categories and presuppositions of political contestation: there are “workers,” there is “a world,” and uniting the workers around the world is how progress (emancipation, liberty, equality, etc.) is made. For Latour and Schultz, there are a number of issues within the above slogan: the workers were only considered to be human; there is no longer (and hasn't ever been) one world that we all inhabit, since it is different proposed worlds and projects that are being contested; and progress is defined in relation to the distribution of gains from production. They argue, “By thinking almost exclusively in terms of production and reproduction, the socialist compass can't account for the way the class landscape is changing shape today” (p. 12, emphasis in original). Concerns of economic production and social reproduction were always “a matter of the reproduction of humans” (ibid., emphasis in original) and “we’re no longer faced with the same material reality” (ibid., emphasis in original) as those of classical Marxism or Liberalism. ⁶

As Latour and Schultz say, “to talk about ‘class’ always means getting ready for battle” (p. 6), and “for two centuries, people's energies were easily mobilized when it was all about increasing production and making the distribution of the wealth thereby obtained a bit less unfair” (p. 18, emphasis in original). However, while Leftists and Liberals may see that the global ecological crisis is a byproduct of global economic production, because they are nonetheless wedded to production for articulating political struggle, there is a need for “a new description and new perspectives for action” (p. 6, emphasis in original)—a “re-class-ification.” The proposed re-class-ification seeks to shift how individuals and struggle are understood, from being based on one's location within economic production to being determined by on whom and from where one depends on for survival (“whom” here being humans and nonhumans alike).

The proposed strategy for ecological class consciousness-raising, and thereby for ecological class formation, is for individuals (people, groups, communities, states, etc.) to begin to describe and “draw up a list” of dependencies so as to cultivate a new type of awareness based on dependencies. As description has long been Latour's preferred method of sociological research, saying in Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory (2007) that “the task of assembling the collective is worth pursuing, but only after the shortcut of society and ‘social explanation’ has been abandoned” (2007:16), there is a similar argument being made in Memo for politics and class formation. As Schultz argued in a preceding interview, “to restart politics, we need to re-describe our territories, our land, and our people” (Latour and Schultz 2020:11), and elsewhere that their work is an attempt at “redescribing and redefining class”“in a way that analytically includes the earthly conditions, the material conditions of existence in a wider sense than the Marxist interpretation of classes allowed for us to theorize” (Schultz 2018:2). Building on what Latour clarified about Actor-Network Theory, where “describing or accounting for a network is what an explanation or an explication is” (1996:337, emphasis in original), one could similarly interpret Latour and Schultz's argument as being “describing or accounting for a network [of dependency] is what [ecological] class consciousness-raising is.” ⁷

A consequence of the redescription they envision is that neither proximity and distance nor location in a system of production will be the primary criterion for orienting political alliances and action. This becomes important since the notion of “territory” is part of what our authors identify as needing to be rethought. “Your territory is whatever you depend on,” argue Latour and Schultz, “no matter how far you have to go to feel what holds you in its grips. This is why an intensive labour of description of lived situations is the indispensable first step towards the emergence of a[n ecological] class,” since “Any description of living conditions is first a self-description that reveals the overlap between the world you live in and the world you live off, and so redraws who you are, on what territory you stand, at what period in time, and what horizons you're gearing up to act on” (pp. 77–78, emphasis in original). While this is all fine and good from a theoretical perspective, one wonders whether mobilizing the terms of “territory” in this way is questionable given the obvious historical and contemporary issues of colonialism and neocolonialism, among others.

Nevertheless, Latour has long advocated that “we should accept living in a declared state of war” (2013:152), and every war takes place on some territory. For Latour, the world is something that is co-constituted by the inhabitants of the earth, and if “we’re no longer humans in nature, but living beings among other living beings freely evolving with and against us and which all take part in the same terra forming” (pp. 43–44, emphasis in original), then there truly is, as the title of a 2002 paper by Latour reads, a “War of the Worlds”—different vying conceptualizations and combating manifestations of a world to become. The subtitle of that same piece is the question “What about Peace?”—a sardonic query, since Latour states “it might after all be better to be at war, and thus to be forced to think about the diplomatic work to be done, than to imagine that there is no war at all and keep talking endlessly about progress, modernity, development—without realizing the price that must be paid in reaching such lofty goals” (2002:3). Only upon accepting such a “war of the worlds” and the different, competing images and dependency networks those images recognize and substantiate can the following “questions . . . finally be raised: who is involved? What are their war aims?” (2002:3).

Thus what is needed is a class consciousness that appreciates the declaration of struggle through and with which individuals may understand themselves, who their allies and enemies are wherever they might be, and—hopefully—thereby relate to the stakes in such a way that action becomes possible. As Latour and Schultz say early on in the Memo, “the state of ecological war has not been clarified,” which is precisely what they set out to do by “politicizing nature” in such a way as to reclassify the orientation to political struggle—to “restart politics,” as they both say in different places—in such a way that ecological and political struggle are practiced synonymously.

As has perhaps been clear from the many extra-textual citations and references, to appreciate not only what the Memo says but also what it attempts to offer to “Members of ecological parties and their present and future electors” (p. iii) requires much prior familiarity with the writings and thought of Latour and Schultz, without which the Memo will likely be met with some bewilderment by readers. It is unclear, despite its identified audience, whom such a piece is for. For those long acquainted with Latour's work, it will certainly fit within a trajectory and sense of experimental outreach and his attempt to interject and mobilize what he has seen as necessary to combat the world as it has been and is currently being constructed. However, the Memo’s utility to such ends remains, at best, uncertain. Many of the other recent writings by both Latour and Schultz, as well as interviews by and with one another, provide a more helpful didacticism than the exposition on display in the Memo. Indeed, for academics—students or researchers—the Memo offers little more than gestures to arguments made better and fleshed out elsewhere, and it may spark confusion or frustration owing to its intentional style and admitted lack of “nuance or notes.”

One curbing response to this criticism may be found in the form of the Memo. Two definitions of “memorandum” are provided at the text's opening to identify the function and desired reception of the piece. The first definition reads “A. A note you jot down to make it easier to remember something; through metonymy, a notebook or exercise book in which you note what you want to recall,” while the second reads “B. A note on an important topic written by an embassy or consular diplomat setting out, for the government they're posted to, the point of view of their government on a given issue” (p. vi). The structure of the Memo certainly fits with the former, being composed of 76 such “notes,” but the veridiction of the second is strained when considering its utility and audience. Thinking that the Memo would be useful, let alone comprehensible, for “Members of the ecological parties and their present and future electors” challenges credulity.

Of note, however, is that at the beginning of the Memo a qualification is provided concerning the authors’ personal relationship to party politics. The first page of text provides some background information on the authors wherein they admit that “Neither [author] has any official position in any of the existing ecological movements, but both are aware of the need to provide political expressions of ecology with a broader base than the one mobilized till now” (p. v). It appears, then, that the “black box” of said movements has not been opened and has been assessed largely from the outside, where judgment and evaluation are provided based solely on perceived effectiveness. It is hardly new to decry that the Left, and/or various ecological movements, have yet to rule the day given the mounting intensity and frequency of ecological disasters and the continued effectiveness of the “enemies” of “the environment.” A slight defense of such an “outsider” evaluation of “the existing ecological movements” could be mounted since, for Latour and Schultz, much of the concern is that the stakes of ecological conflict have yet to be fully incorporated into a political position appropriately configured to the situation.

Speaking of “the situation,” the timing of the publication of the Memo was unfortunate, as indicated by the authors’ Postface for the English edition, which addresses the Russian invasion of Ukraine. This inclusion was obligatory given that the authors argued that Europe and the European Union are especially well situated to offer a base, model, and guide for the cultivation of the ecological class and effective geosocial class political action. In part, this argument is made since, in the current multi-polar world, the other options of China or the United States are assessed to be obviously not up to the task. There is, as there has been for Latour, a type of European exceptionalism (or perhaps generously we can read it as a byproduct of familiarity and locatedness) that features in the Memo and makes the relevance of the Memo for others questionable. As in the aforementioned 1998 piece by Latour, Latour's overtly political suggestions have been explicitly for Europe—a “new Left European Party”; and throughout his other works one finds frequent mention of Trump, the American Republican Party, and Americanization in general as clear manifestations of a proposal for the world that should not be followed and should be openly combatted.

One could perhaps imagine an additional Postface that is also now required in response to the anti-colonial, and especially anti-France, movement, and efforts currently underway in the Sahel Region of Africa. Ironically, these latter events have perhaps forced awareness of the relationship between “the land we live in and the land we live from” for the French, providing a new awareness of historical dependencies of the West on “the rest.” One can only speculate as to how Latour, who began his postgraduate national service years in the neighboring Republic of Côte d’Ivoire, would assess these recent developments.

However, just as Harman says that Latour's “third” period can be found already in the earlier eras, so too in the reverse, since some of what may have caused alarm with Latour's earlier work—“attempts to dominate, strategies for winning battles, means of attack, trails of strength, and other forms of violence” (Amsterdamska 1990:496)—may now be received, if not accepted, with greater agreement or appreciation now that the Overton Window shifted by “the Anthropocene” has foregrounded survivability, habitability, and environmental degradation as matters of care and of practically ubiquitous political concern. As Charles Péguy (the subject of Latour's dissertation) said, “One would accomplish a great deal, one would perhaps accomplish everything, if only one compelled the combatants to occupy their true lines of battle” (2019:49), and the Memo can certainly be understood as Latour and Schultz's attempt at encouraging just such an awareness of the “true lines of battles,” of who the combatants and what the alliances truly are, so that a “world” may be won that respects and is built based on sustainable dependencies the globe over.