Reinventing the Diplomat: Isabelle Stengers,Bruno Latour and Baptiste Morizot

Introduction

Within broadly considered posthumanities, various conceptual personae have made notable appearances in recent debates: the spokesperson, the representative, the nomad, the apprentice, the translator, the intercessor, the idiot. ¹ This article sheds light on the diplomat and brings together three important versions of this figure that circulate in current debates on nonhumans and politics in continental philosophy. All three focus on forms of engagement that would allow for the construction of common worlds, multispecies cohabitation and the reclamation of alternative forms of knowledge. As a conceptual persona with this specific agenda, the diplomat was reinvented almost 30 years ago by Isabelle Stengers in her Cosmopolitics series (2010–11 [1996–7]). Subsequently, it was taken up and further developed by Bruno Latour and, most recently, by Baptiste Morizot. By integrating nonhumans into their concept of diplomacy, Stengers, Latour and Morizot reconceptualize politics for the 21st century. ² In this context, nonhumans include a wide variety of entities (microbes, drugs, spirits, wolves) in relation to which humans as individuals and collectives are generated.

In its trajectory from Stengers through Latour to Morizot, the figure of the diplomat has changed character and modes of operation to respond to different theoretical and practical challenges. Stengers is the primary originator of the concept in this theoretical context. Latour explicitly borrows the concept from Stengers, establishing a dialogue with her on the role of diplomacy in negotiating various knowledge practices and modes of existence. Morizot, in turn, expressly borrows the diplomat from Latour, without, however, appropriately acknowledging Stengers as the inventor of the concept. In this article, I address this unacknowledged heritage and consider how the figure of the diplomat has changed in its various incarnations.

Unsurprisingly, the three versions of the diplomat exhibit significant similarities. In order to better understand what is at stake in the concept’s various iterations, I propose two accompanying ‘character functions’. ³ Firstly, I examine the conceptual ‘enemy’ mobilized by each philosopher as a counter-figure to think ‘against’, and thereby produce, the version of the diplomat they present. I suggest that in Stengers this enemy figure is the ‘expert’, in Latour it is the ‘modernizer’, and in Morizot the ‘colonizer’. The second character function is the ‘next of kin’, a figure that is closest to a given version of the diplomat. I demonstrate that in Stengers the ‘next of kin’ is the ‘heretic’, in Latour it is the ‘designer’, and in Morizot the ‘amateur’. These character functions – the enemy and the next of kin – allow us to discern subtle, yet important, differences between conceptual personae as envisaged by each philosopher and, more generally, help us see where the differences lie between three philosophical projects that strongly resonate with each other in terms of ideas, references and goals.

Historically, the figure of the diplomat is an ambiguous character, an individual who occupies a position of power yet simultaneously exists in a state of constant vulnerability, who lives by a flexible ethical code whilst acting in line with the status quo. The term ‘diplomacy’ is etymologically connected with privilege, secrecy, duplicity and official treaties (Constantinou, 1996: 76–89). It was associated with dissimulation and intrigue, ‘shrewdness, scheming and chicane’, ⁴ espionage, surveillance, eavesdropping, use of cryptography and ciphered messages (Leira, 2016: n.p). When the term first emerged during the French Revolution, it was primarily hurled as a derogatory word (cf. Constantinou and Sharp, 2016; Oglesby, 2016). A diplomat is not an individual one would necessarily trust, rely on, aspire to become, attach oneself to, or even deem capable of honourable actions.

Considering this highly ambiguous historical baggage, the rather antiquated figure of the diplomat seems to be a somewhat counter-intuitive choice for thinkers invested in helping us think differently about our world today, and our futures. The aim of this article is therefore twofold. First, it is to trace the metamorphosis of the diplomat in Stengers, Latour and Morizot: how the concept has been constructed, what are its key features and aims. Second, the article considers whether the diplomat is the most productive choice for each thinker’s specific philosophical project. By proposing three companion figures (the heretic, the designer, and the amateur), the article responds to Stengers’ invitation to create other figures that could become a useful resource for thinking about our interdependencies in the 21st century (cf. Stengers, 2019: 43; Stengers and Bordeleau, 2011).

Isabelle Stengers: The Diplomat and the Heretic

Stengers first employs the concept of the diplomat in her Cosmopolitics series (2010–11 [1996–7]), develops it more fully in La Vierge et le neutrino (2006) and revisits it most recently in her article ‘We Are Divided’ (2020). Stengers constructs the figure of the diplomat in the context of various forms of practice, whether scientific, religious, activist or therapeutic. ⁵ She is interested in how practices are created, maintained, transmitted, translated and destroyed. A common feature of all practices is their vulnerability, both in terms of establishing their modes of operation and their survival as practices. According to the Belgian philosopher, ‘we live in a cemetery of already destroyed practices’ (Stengers, 2010b: 18). For this reason, then, ‘[t]he problem for each practice is how to foster its own force’ (Stengers, 2005a: 195). In other words, the question is how to create the milieu that practices need in order to maintain themselves, and how to enrol agents (human and nonhuman alike) that would support their ongoing existence.

Stengers posits that each practice is singular, that is, that ‘no practice can be defined “like any other”, just as no living species is like any other’ (Stengers, 2005a: 184). That means that in order to understand what a practice is in its unique specificity, we need to approach it as it ‘diverges’ from other practices. We need to find out its borders, which means that we need to determine what kind of questions would be accepted by practitioners as relevant, and which ones would be considered inappropriate or even insulting. To think in terms of practice is to ask what has the power to draw practitioners together. How does the practice oblige practitioners to think, feel, or even to hesitate (cf. Stengers, 2006a: 128)? Even though Stengers is unwilling to provide a precise definition of a practitioner, her minimal description is that a practitioner is someone who is engaged in an activity in which she is aware that ‘all ways of doing are not the same’ (Stengers, 2006a: 160). Practice is, thus, a realm in which practitioners are activated in very specific ways to pose a question, formulate a problem, establish modes of engagement with a being and share this process with other practitioners. We could say that practice is a well-articulated attachment to a nonhuman (cf. Stengers, 2010b). And this articulation can be best achieved through collectives of practitioners.

According to Stengers, practices produce diplomats, or more precisely, practitioners can become diplomats. This can happen only in moments of crisis: when a practice is challenged by a difficult question, by a new being that needs to be accounted for, by the co-presence of practices which conflict, with one set generating problematic implications for another. Diplomats are generated by concrete, conflictual situations. There is no universal ‘diplomatic corps’ that could produce diplomats who would be equally effective in all locations and contexts (tout-terrain) (Stengers, 2006a: 256). For Stengers ‘the invention of diplomacy precedes that of politics’ in the sense that diplomacy creates the possibility of the coexistence of multiple practices without the necessity of mutual annihilation (Stengers, 2011: 387). This is what Stengers calls ‘peace’ and what drives diplomacy in her philosophy. This means that peace, as Stengers envisions it, is local, precarious and temporary. It cannot be used as an argument to force others – individuals in different situations, challenged by different questions – to comply in the name of a universal, transcendent ideal.

Stengers’ diplomat is characterized by two principal traits. First, the diplomat must be open to collaboration that could potentially decentre their authority. Diplomacy is impossible if a situation differentiates clearly between a strong and a weak party (Stengers, 2006a: 254). Even though ‘[d]iplomacy exists only among “powers”’, there needs to be a relative balance of forces for diplomacy to work (Stengers, 2011: 378). Stengers cites the practice of social science as an example. The balance of forces required for diplomacy to take place is established when a social scientist addresses herself to a group that she studies in a way that empowers the group to pose their own questions, create their own positions, produce their own points of view. The group is then actively involved in the co-creation of knowledge, positioning them on a relatively equal footing with the sociologist. ⁶ Such an approach contrasts radically with a situation in which a sociologist asks a group to fill out a ready-made questionnaire, and subsequently explains the group’s answers without giving its members a chance to challenge the account. In the latter case, we have a clear differentiation between the weak party (the group) and the strong party (the sociologist): diplomacy could not take place.

Second, Stengers’ diplomat is always exposed to accusations of treason. In our example of a sociologist and her group, this would mean that if the sociologist allowed the group to co-create her questions and methods, she might be regarded as disrespecting the principles and values of social-science practice when reporting on her findings to sociologist colleagues. She could be accused of being ‘enlisted’ by the group she studies, of lacking objectivity, and so of betraying the disciplinary practice. Furthermore, she could be accused of treason by her research subjects. If the sociologist does not allow the group that she studies to resist the proposed interpretation, she could also be accused by the group of instrumentalizing them ‘in the name of science’ (see Stengers, 2006a: 254–5). There is always the possibility that the diplomat perpetrates a double betrayal, owing to her dual or divided loyalty: the loyalty owed to her fellow practitioners and the loyalty owed to the subjects she studies. The precise format of such betrayals varies from practice to practice. Accusations of betrayal would be different, for example, if levelled against a physicist compared to a priest, a doctor, a lawyer or an artist. Yet, the diplomat is a figure who is created by this tension, exists in this tension, and whose function is characterized by the attempt to bridge multiple obligations (to the group she studies and to her sociologist colleagues, as in our example) in order to make them coexist. She intervenes between groups with divergent attachments, values, procedures and goals in order to invent some sort of temporary and situation-specific agreement between them (Stengers, 2010b: 28).

Having said that, the tensions through which the diplomat is created should not themselves be resolved. In her later work, Stengers often refers to Donna Haraway’s phrase ‘staying with the trouble’ to emphasize the importance of sustaining these problems. In suggesting diplomacy as a term for this challenging aspect of practice, Stengers underlines ‘the need to take borders seriously’ and reminds us that there are no universal problems that concern everybody equally (cf. Stengers, 2005a: 193). Problems are always local and specific, and they must be approached as such. That is also why the diplomat ‘can find a response only in terms of a given type of situation, according to the terms of a given encounter’, rather than through universally applicable thought patterns and ideas (Stengers, 2011: 386). This capacity to suspend habits of thought in order to resist ready-made generalities about who we are and what we know is what Stengers calls the diplomatic ‘art of activation’, ‘the art of artifice’ or ‘the art of heterogeneity’ (cf. Stengers, 2005b: 1003, 2006a: 267–8). As Stengers claims: ‘diplomacy does not refer to good will, togetherness, a common language or an intersubjective understanding’. It is not a matter of negotiation between independent human beings but rather it is a form of construction among attached humans, who are constrained by various ongoing links and forms of belonging (Stengers, 2005a: 193). It is a form of invention that is bound to a situation, fragile and open to change as soon as the situation changes.

This means, then, that the diplomat is not an official delegate dispatched to make peace in the name of a group with which she identifies. She is neither an authorized spokesperson nor a plenipotentiary (Stengers, 2006a: 255). Her function is much more complicated. The role of the diplomat is to pay attention to the concrete circumstances of a problematic situation when practices clash, to draw attention to consequences rather than causes, and to focus on an appropriate response to a situation rather than on its explanation. In that sense, the aim of diplomacy is the ‘production of a new proposition’ (Stengers, 2005a: 193), which would not unite all parties through a common cause but rather reformulate the problem in a novel way. If diplomatic practice is to be successful, it needs to be capable of generating new stories (récits) and fabulations that contribute to protecting old practices and generating new ones (Stengers, 2020: n.p.). Diplomats are initiators of alternative imaginaries to envision cohabitation between various practitioners with diverse attachments to different nonhumans.

One of the fundamental aspects of the ‘art of the diplomat’ is hesitation, closely connected to what Stengers calls ‘obligations’. ⁷ Obligation is an awareness that ‘we are not alone in the world’ (cf. Stengers, 2005a: 191). ⁸ ‘To be obligated is to know one is indebted to something other than oneself for what one is’ (Stengers, 2020: n.p.). Hesitation is key in any practice as it allows new beings to emerge: it generates forms of knowledge that are able to welcome these beings and respond to them. For Stengers it is important that nobody has the right to ‘a priori silence hesitation’ (Stengers 2010b: 16). What is important here is not only that individual practitioners are able to hesitate, but also that they are able to hesitate together as a collective, when faced with a challenge regarding what they do and how they exist as practitioners. Diplomacy requires ‘the ability of a group to ponder the way it formulates its obligations, its ability to make common sense of what maintains it and what it has to maintain’ (Stengers, 2020: n.p.). The question becomes: how to hesitate with one’s colleagues (cf. Stengers, 2006a: 133). Through the process of hesitation, a new ‘we’ is constructed that no longer identifies with the old collective from which it emerged, created by the reformulation of a problem. This collective is produced through the necessity of learning how to receive new beings whose mode of existence we are not yet able to comprehend, and with whom we need to create some form of relation (e.g. Gaia, AI, GMO, novel viruses like SARS-CoV-2).

From this perspective, the diplomat’s enemy is a figure who neither doubts, nor hesitates, nor feels obligated to anything or anybody. Someone who considers themselves independent, sure of their knowledge and convinced by the idea of progress. Someone who feels entitled and protected by the general consensus. Whilst Stengers does not explicitly suggest a counter-figure to the diplomat in her work, the ‘expert’ could perhaps fulfil this role. The expert, in Stengers’ model, is a figure whose practice is not threatened by the issue under discussion, whose mode of existence and identity are not endangered by a decision resulting from negotiations between practitioners and diplomats. Above all, the expert represents the clearly delineated interests of stakeholders, parties and groups. Her role is to know with authority, rather than doubt, and to demonstrate mastery of a particular subject. ⁹ The expert’s task is not to provoke thinking, but to display specific competences derived from training. In Stengers’ work, experts are ‘agents of modernity’, who represent knowledge and present themselves as free of all obligations. In turn, Stengers associates this stance with ‘modern stupidity’ (la bêtise moderne). She proclaims not only that ‘stupidity is our problem’, but also that it is the fundamental problem of our times (cf. Stengers, 2006a: 196, 2020). For the philosopher, stupidity is an arrogant refusal to be obligated by anything, frightened by anything, made uncertain by anything. Stengers attempts to resist the notion that we can now say that ‘we have reached a point in history where we know’, and that this proposition can be deployed as an argument to destroy alternative practices that do not conform to modern scientific modes of operation (cf. Despret, 2012).

In her recent article ‘We Are Divided’ (2020), Stengers comes to question the efficacy of the figure of the diplomat. She claims, for instance: ‘Today the diplomats are not equipped to cultivate the art of consultation they depend on’ (Stengers, 2020: n.p.). Consultation is a diplomatic process in which obligations to others (human and nonhuman alike) are conceived and reflected upon (cf. Stengers, 2005b: 1003, 2006a: 257). The problem, as Stengers sees it, lies in the chains of dependence that capitalism has generated to the detriment of the relationships of interdependence. Stengers turns to John Dewey’s figure of the inquirer in order to ‘reactivate the sense of interdependence’ (Stengers, 2020: n.p.). The difference between dependence and interdependence is one of obligation. Dependence is not only a fact of life but also a chain of inescapable necessities that suppress all protest and hesitation, produce impossible choices (‘infernal alternatives’) and generate unrealizable dreams of independence (humans free from all physical, emotional and social limitations; transhumanist projects of immortality; moving to Mars). Interdependence, in contrast, is a relationship of interconnectedness to other beings that does not arouse fantasies of final liberation. Beings that participate in interdependent relationships ‘become capable of what they are not capable of by themselves’ (Stengers, 2020: n.p.). This amplification of being – owing to the involvement of various entities – makes them obligated to others. Inquirers are experimenters who create a feeling of interdependence and who help groups articulate their existential indebtedness to others.

The diplomat is not an innocent figure. As discussed above, it is associated with betrayal, divided loyalties, ambiguity and institutionalized power. Stengers is fully aware that diplomats are always suspect: they are evasive – ‘it depends’ is their familiar catchphrase – and they avoid siding with a single party, choosing neither us nor them exclusively (cf. Stengers, 2011: 410). Simply put, the diplomat is not a particularly inspiring figure. This begs the question: why use a term with such lacklustre connotations? And is it worth it? Like Haraway, Stengers tries to avoid innocent words, ones that we could use with complete confidence. ¹⁰ Such words make us feel too safe, too protected, too detached from risk and, in Stengers’ take, it is important to ‘forfeit this protection’ in order to pay proper attention to a situation, to consider the consequences of our decisions and, ultimately, to respect our obligations (Stengers, 2012: n.p.). The diplomat is fruitful as a concept, she claims, because ‘it avoids any romantic attraction for an “elsewhere” that might inspire the hope of escaping from “here” once and for all’ (Stengers, 2011: 410). It makes us attached to the situation and to its stakes. The diplomat does not aspire to a transcendental standpoint. Indeed, this is a position that Stengers consistently rejects, and constantly evades, throughout her work. This kind of standpoint can, all too quickly, degenerate into the production of normative claims, applicable to all. Faced with equally valid appeals to the common good or reason from all parties, an arbiter could never decide between conflicting demands with any degree of confidence, nor with a sense of comfort at their own decision. Although the reclamation of problematic words is always compromising to some degree, Stengers considers that this work should not be avoided.

And yet, it is not clear whether the figure of the diplomat precisely, or entirely productively, corresponds to what is actually at stake in Stengers’ philosophical project. Even though the diplomat is equivocal and non-innocent, this figure has always been a part of a political establishment. This is an individual who cultivates a close relationship with the sources of power (be that the emperor, the king or the state), who supports and benefits from the status quo. It is indeed curious that Stengers chooses this figure, considering that much of her work is devoted to practitioners who challenge the established ways of knowing and being: ethnopsychiatrists, hypnotists, neo-pagan witches, drug-user unions, eco-activists, supporters of free public transport. That is, those practitioners that find a reason to rebel against authority and challenge the way things are in order to invent alternative ways of living and, in so doing, to produce other, better, worlds (cf. Stengers, 2002).

For this reason, I would like to argue that a different – though unacknowledged – figure flickers through Stengers’ work that would perhaps be more suited to the tasks Stengers allocates to the diplomat: the heretic. A heretic is an individual who denies or doubts doctrine, because there is something more important than doctrinal mandates. ¹¹ The term ‘heresy’ comes from the Greek word hairesis (αἵρεσις), denoting ‘choice’ or ‘thing chosen’, and was employed with reference to the tenets of particular philosophical schools (Cross and Livingstone, 1997: 758). In modern definitions, ‘heresy’ carries a derogatory meaning of turning away from the right path, violating important religious teachings and questioning generally accepted ideas. Yet, heresy is a choice to question, and to thereby renew a practice, and thus a demonstration of loyalty to that practice. A heretic is opposed to doctrinal authority. Her hesitation is very concrete (often with regard to a particular article of faith) and is an attempt at an alternative way to inherit the truth of a dogma. The heretic proposes new understandings of a practice’s teachings, thereby transforming it. This enables a collective to respond to the challenges faced by the practice to which they belong. In this way, heresy is an active reconstruction of a heritage. Just like the diplomat, the heretic is a compromised yet productive figure: she challenges established authority precisely because the truth of a practice has been lost during the development of its doctrine. She injects heterogeneity into a practice. Whilst the diplomat risks only herself but never her practice, the heretic puts both herself and her practice at risk in her attempts at renewal. Such nuances are important in terms of Stengers’ broader theoretical agenda (cf. Stengers, 2002). In this context, the heretic might well be considered the diplomat’s next of kin or, more radically, perhaps even a replacement for the diplomat entirely, as a figure more suitable to Stengers’ philosophical project and its goals.

Bruno Latour: The Diplomat and the Designer

Latour borrows the figure of the diplomat directly from Stengers’ work, and duly acknowledges his indebtedness to the Belgian philosopher in his own interventions. The diplomat appears, notably, in Latour’s Politics of Nature (Latour, 2004) and An Inquiry into Modes of Existence (AIME) (Latour, 2013) and, more recently, briefly surfaces in his meditation on Gaia, though with much less force. As mentioned above, Latour’s diplomat hews very close to Stengers’. The two versions are articulated with similar reference points: hesitation, attachment, consultation, reliable witnesses, civility and civilisation, the opposition between war and peace, cosmopolitics, common worlds, and composition. Indeed, in his acknowledgements to Politics of Nature, Latour openly proclaims that ‘[he] shamelessly looted Stengers’ Cosmopolitics’ (Latour, 2004: viii). ¹² Latour and Stengers have been engaged in a game of conceptual ping-pong for over 30 years: one invents a concept which the other picks up to add their own spin, before lobbing the ‘new’ iteration back over the philosophical net. As such, it is difficult to identify the exact differences between their two versions of diplomacy. After all, as Latour admits, AIME – his grand project of diplomacy – is ‘philosophy à la Isabelle Stengers and Donna Haraway’ (Latour and Davis, 2015: 51). Nevertheless, Latour and Stengers’ diplomats are not identical twins. In the following sections, I will focus on excavating the subtle, yet consequential, differences between the two figures.

Despite their overlapping preoccupations, theoretical references and conceptual vocabulary, Latour and Stengers share neither a common focus nor key problem. Whereas Stengers’ is mainly concerned with practices – what is proper to practice, how concrete practices constitute practitioners – Latour attends to regimes of veridiction or, in other words, different ways of speaking truth. These regimes, in turn, are produced by different modes of existence, modes that generate different types of beings whose existence has to be constantly maintained. Stengers tests the boundaries of a practice and its resilience: she explores how to inject risk and heterogeneity into a practice and wonders what happens to it when we do (cf. Stengers, 2002). Whilst Stengers focuses on how truth is undone, Latour, by contrast, is more preoccupied by how truth is maintained and examines how it is sedimented and preserved in institutions (such as law, science, religion). He also poses questions about how to remake institutions so that they can capture and sustain new beings. This is a question of design, a topic to which we will shortly return.

Notwithstanding their many similarities, modes of existence are not the same as practices. The difference lies in the idea of value that is at the forefront of Latour’s project. ‘Value is a property of the world’ and, for Latour, truths are connected to values (Latour and Davis, 2015: 52). ‘The difference between good and bad is what defines the mode’, and this is different for science, law and religion (Latour and Davis, 2015: 52). Latour argues that one of the goals of modernisation was to withdraw value from the world in order to establish facts. In response, AIME proposes an inventory of values that allows us to face ‘the intrusion of Gaia’ by capturing beings and their interdependencies that were previously invisible (Latour and Davis, 2015: 52). This is Latour’s ‘ecologizing’ project that is established as an alternative operation to the modernizing effort. Considered from this perspective, the enemy figure in Latour is the modernizer. This is an individual who classifies the world according to the ready-made binaries of nature vs culture, who looks for metalanguage to account for all types of existences, who refers to a transcendental arbiter (such as laws of nature, progress, or rationality), who considers herself free and detached and, thus, is incapable of responding to the ecological challenge facing the world today.

In his later work, Latour introduces the diplomat as a replacement for the figure of the representative (or spokesperson) of nonhumans in the ‘parliament of things’ upon which he had previously relied. One could say that this is a move from practices (the representative) to modes of existence (the diplomat). Diplomats can glean what practitioners really cherish. Unlike with Stengers, such investigatory work does not necessarily have to happen in moments of crisis, however, nor does it need to be undertaken by practitioners themselves. AIME is an attempt at building a diplomatic scene on a grand scale, where diplomacy is a method of inquiry that is also open to non-scientists. As Latour claims, AIME is less a scientific project and more an ‘inquest’ whose aim is to generate interest among non-academics in collective work: artists, designers, activists, and the general public (cf. Latour, 2012: 959–60; Latour and Davis, 2015: 51).

I suggest that Latour’s diplomat finds close kinship with the designer. And that this association materializes on several levels. Design involves the ‘drawing together of things’ (Dinge) in a way that allows diplomats to compose a common world collectively. The diplomat’s triage is not structured according to the modern distinction between nature and culture, but according to what is essential and what is expendable in terms of the maintenance of a collective (Latour, 2004: 214). She ensures that the specific human-nonhuman collective with which she is working remains open towards new entities and, in so doing, safeguards the possibility of its reconfiguration (cf. Latour, 2004: 217). The diplomat is charged with translating, that is, with offering to beings the vehicle specific to them so that they can express themselves truthfully. She oversees a transfer of utterances by making sure that the felicity conditions of modes are respected. Furthermore, diplomacy involves designing new institutions that would generate previously invisible beings and maintain their existence. Institutions are important for Latour in this context because they protect against a hegemony of one mode of existence over others, for instance, the hegemony of science over religion, politics, technology, and morality (Latour, 2012: 953). This constructive effort with heterogenous entities is one of the key characteristics of Latour’s diplomacy.

There is some difference between Latour and Stengers regarding the idea of ‘composing common worlds’. Even though both use this phrase in their later works quite frequently to emphasize the fact that collectives are always fabricated, the philosophers differ on the question of universality. Stengers is more interested in moments of hesitation and risk, when a situation could easily escalate into war but somehow does not. These moments of ‘giving peace a chance’, when peace is merely a possibility, lead to the composition of shared worlds that are always partial and temporary (Stengers, 2010b: 28). These compositions could be considered as side effects of something more important, pointing, for Stengers, to the recalcitrance of objects to enquiry. The logic is the following: taking the recalcitrance of objects seriously means taking risks seriously, and this means, in turn, good construction, good science (and good politics) (cf. Latour, 1997: xix). Latour, in contrast, is more interested in the actual peace-making process, even though he shares Stengers’ interest for hesitation. Stengers’ figure is an activator and, to some extent, also a trouble-maker who encourages hesitation in an effort to slow down processes of unification. Latour’s diplomat, however, is more interested in the constructive gesture of designing new collectives and universalizing. As Latour claims with regard to his AIME project:

it is true that a certain horizon of universality remains. There is no reason to do without it, since it is still the goal we have inherited. The hope of a common world accompanies the diplomat: he enters into negotiation to try to save something of the idea of a common world, knowing that this common world must actually be composed. The universal has to be made, which is why the diplomat first tries to multiply the contrasts and the hiatus. The problem is that we have universalized too quickly. (Latour, 2012: 955)

And, he adds, that ‘[j]ust because we universalized too quickly does not mean that we should not universalize’ (Latour, 2012: 956). This common world, ‘the promised land of universality’ (Latour, 2002: 29), is particularly important for Latour because it emphasizes that the process of world-building requires constant attention and concerted effort.

We previously questioned whether the diplomat was the most suitable figure for Stengers’ philosophical agenda. We could, and should, pose the same enquiry for Latour and his own diplomat. In contrast to Stengers, Latour is much less attracted to minoritarian thinking and acting. As he admits in his foreword to Stengers’ (1997) Power and Invention, she is much more politically radical than he. Whereas Stengers is quite vocal with regard to her anti-capitalist stance and her left-wing activism, Latour feels ‘irritation towards leftism’ and avoids using such grand words as ‘capitalism’ or ‘revolution’ (see Latour and Davis, 2015: 54). What is more, Latour is more comfortable with traditional political notions such as constitution, parliament, the republic and democracy, and he attempts to carve out a space for nonhumans within such familiar landscape. ¹³ From this perspective, the figure of the diplomat – an individual belonging to the political establishment, however ambiguously she may otherwise be situated – seems to be pertinent to Latour’s project and its philosophical temperament. It is certainly fitter for his purpose than for Stengers’, given the latter’s radical political commitments.

Baptiste Morizot: The Diplomat and the Amateur

A third, relatively expansive iteration of the diplomat is found in Morizot’s monographs Les Diplomates (Morizot, 2016) and Manières d’être vivant (Morizot, 2020). ¹⁴ Morizot takes Latour’s diplomat as a point of departure, developing its remit in order to account for human-animal relationships, and more specifically, the case of cohabitation between wolves and humans in the south-west of France. Latour is forthright in acknowledging that he ‘looted’ the diplomat from Stengers’ earlier work, as noted above. This makes it that much more curious, then, that Morizot makes no mention of the Belgian philosopher in his books. ¹⁵ Even if Morizot only encounters, and profits from, Stengers’ diplomat indirectly, with the figure mediated by Latour, this omission is problematic. Not the least because of the context in which Morizot deploys the diplomat. Indeed, he builds directly, albeit tacitly, on Stengers’ own work of the figure in more-than-human worlds. It is even more puzzling considering that many notions that Morizot uses to think about diplomacy in human-animal relationships are also explored by Stengers: cosmopoliteness (cosmopolitesse, cosmopoli), requirement (exigence), taste (goût), attention, narration (récit), new alliances (nouvelles alliances), philosophical inheritance, ‘etho-ecology’, interdependency, animism, a situated approach to problems, and activist notions of ‘composing and fighting’ (composer et lutter).

Morizot critiques Latour’s diplomat as a starting point for his own reflection on the figure. He contends that Latour’s attempt to improve the representation of nonhumans in politics replicates, rather than mitigates, modernizers’ strategies. In Morizot’s reading, Latour responds to the crisis of representation with more representation, a manoeuvre which would likewise typify the response of the ‘modernizing front’ to such problems (Morizot, 2016: 33–4, n. 17). Instead, the specificity of Morizot’s own diplomat, he claims, is that:

[the diplomat] is not in the first place a representative of nonhumans in human assemblies. [. . .] It is not a question of diplomacy between humans representing non-humans, but diplomacy directly with non-humans. The model is the explorer, not the deputy: the diplomat here does not represent his camp, he presents it; he does not defend his interests, but the interests of the relationship itself. (Morizot, 2016: 33–4, n. 17, emphasis in original)

Morizot sets up his version of the diplomat as radically different from Latour’s (and Stengers’) antecedent(s). I would argue, however, that this contention is based on a fundamental misreading of Latour’s project, and that Morizot’s misapprehension results, at least partly, from the elision of Stengers from his own reflection on diplomacy. As I observed above, Latour moves from the figure of spokesperson (or deputy, as Morizot puts it) to the diplomat in order to shift from mere representation (as in the parliament of things) to collective composition (as in AIME). Stengers underlines that diplomacy is not a matter of representing humans, nonhumans, or any stakeholders with clearly delineated interests, but rather of siding with the situation itself. What matters is ‘not the empowerment of stakeholders but rather the empowerment of a situation: giving a situation that gathers the power to force those who are gathered to think and invent’ (Stengers, 2010b: 21, emphasis in original). This means that diplomacy can be undertaken only with nonhumans rather than merely on their behalf. This aspect is what Latour leverages and develops from Stengers’ earlier work and what Morizot, in the quote above, refers to as defending ‘the relationship itself’. It seems therefore that Morizot sets up a strawman – a figure of the diplomat that exists neither in Latour nor Stengers – in order to develop his own iteration of the diplomat that, in fact, is quite similar to Stengers’ original. In the following discussion, I will concentrate on the unique characteristics of Morizot’s diplomat.

Morizot’s conceptual effort focuses on accounting for relationships between humans and other living beings (les êtres vivants), concentrating on ‘biotic communities’ and biodiversity. This is where he dramatically differs from Latour: the latter pays no particular attention to organisms and makes no fundamental distinction between living and non-living nonhumans. By contrast, Morizot is interested in communication and relationality between living beings of various species. He advances ‘interspecies diplomacy’ (diplomatie interespèces), a theory and practice of what he terms ‘adjusted considerations’ (des égards ajustés) (Morizot, 2020: 285). This is a form of constant attention to the variety of expressions of living beings and their interdependencies. In his phrasing, Morizot favours ‘adjusted’ rather than ‘just’ considerations because we can never be certain of the moral status of the living entities with which we engage (human individuals, means or ends, pure matter) and that is why we need to constantly readjust our attention to how these beings respond to us. One way to practice such interspecies diplomacy is the art of tracking (pistage), in which sensitivity and availability to the signs of other life forms is developed. When tracking, one relearns how to see and translate alterity in order to find forms of possible cohabitation (Morizot, 2020: 20). This form of complete attention to difference and a constant interpretation of signs is not a characteristic exclusive to human beings but is a feature of all life (Morizot, 2020: 142). From this perspective, learning to live together in the world of otherness is the political challenge par excellence (cf. Morizot, 2020: 26).

Morizot pays special attention to relations between humans and wolves and, in this context, develops the idea of ‘animal diplomacy’ (la diplomatie animale), a rearticulation of the concept of politics. Here, humans enter political relations with living beings, such as wolves, that are not based on force but on the capacity of animals to exhibit conventional behaviours (Morizot, 2016: 116). Through ‘ethological ruses’ (la ruse éthologique), humans insert themselves into the political ethograms of animals, and so doing become able to influence animal behaviour to avoid conflict (Morizot, 2016: 90). For example, wolf packs routinely mark the borders of the territory in their possession to communicate this information to other packs. Morizot suggests that humans could strategically employ this existing intra-species tool to communicate, and thus manage more effectively, the distribution of territory between humans and wolves (Morizot, 2016: 118). The role of the diplomat is thus to realize that there is already something like politics in animal worlds and to tap into these existing webs in order to bring about a form of interspecies peace. Such an approach is preferable, as Morizot sees it, to simply broadening the scope of human politics to include biotic communities, such as giving rights to rivers or turning animals into political subjects (cf. Morizot, 2016: 120). Morizot argues for what he calls ‘ethocentrism’, an approach that assumes that ‘all living beings behave’ (tout se comporte), and argues for collaboration with the singularities of living beings to establish ‘diplomatic cohabitation’ (Morizot, 2016: 180, 2017).

For Morizot, the diplomat role is not the exclusive purview of humans but is also available to nonhumans. He considers diplomacy to be a kind of ‘asymmetrical negotiation’ (négociation asymétrique), meaning that the interlocutor does not have to be rational, conscious, speaking or willing to negotiate in order for diplomacy to take place. It is enough that the nonhuman interlocutor is intelligent, ‘ratio-morph’, social, territorial and knows how to receive messages (Morizot, 2016: 38). This contention inspired Stengers to voice her opinion on Morizot’s version of the diplomat, commenting that she is a little uneasy (un peu gênée) with his usage of the term in the specified context. Her key point of critique is that ‘the pact with wolves’ that Morizot proposes – a scenario in which the wolves would send their diplomats to establish peace with humans, with the latter becoming the pact’s co-authors – is not entirely convincing: ‘the pact is our problem’ and not theirs. Wolves have their own problems, formulated on their own terms. The potential for brokering peace with humans is likely not their top priority (Stengers, 2019: 29–33). For this reason, the concept of diplomacy might not be suitable for Morizot’s usage.

In contrast to Morizot, Stengers and Latour maintain that only humans can be diplomats. Diplomacy is considered to be an inquiry that operates within the semiotic limits of human beings, that is, it operates within the field of differences that are meaningful to humans. It avoids detaching meaning from bodily situatedness. Morizot tries to avoid what he considers to be Latour’s ‘human-centred cosmopolitical universal’ (l’universel cosmopolitique humanocentré) in favour of ‘eco-ethological association, mutualism, that is, a form of biotic community that goes beyond human universal and includes it’ (Morizot, 2016: 41). Yet, one has to retort that the form of anthropocentrism that Latour champions is arguably minimal, in the sense that it is restricted to the semiotic framework with which human beings are equipped as human animals. ¹⁶ This framework represents an obstacle that would be challenging, even impossible, to surmount: such a procedure would potentially entail a regression to the disembodied ‘view from nowhere’, an approach resisted by both Latour and Stengers throughout their work.

Morizot contends that, if we learn how to cohabit with the most stigmatized, the most hated and the most feared of all animals – such as the wolf – then we will be able to cohabit with other beings as well (Morizot, 2016: 89). By considering most challenging cases of cohabitation, it is possible to measure the extent to which our most fundamental political concepts need reformulation in order to accommodate such beings. This is quite optimistic, as Sarah Vanuxem aptly observes. She convincingly argues that this is because, in actuality, the wolf is probably not one of the most challenging beings with which humans might cohabit. Rather, an insect such as the mosquito would fulfil this role. Firstly, mosquitos transmit lethal diseases, and so represent one of the biggest animal dangers to humans. Second, and more importantly, a repartition of a territory, as Morizot envisions it with regards to wolf-human cohabitation, would be much more difficult to carry out in a negotiation between mosquitos and humans (see Vanuxem, 2018: 99, n. 203). Diplomacy, as it is conceptualized by Morizot, works in this context only because wolves are territorial animals and diplomacy is traditionally concerned with territoriality and sovereignty. Yet, the species-specific politics of wolves cannot be so easily translated into ‘nonhuman politics’ tout court. I would argue that a conceptual shift towards ‘articulation’, or more aptly to ‘co-articulation’, could be a more effective way of thinking about nonhuman politics for various kinds of entities (Janicka, 2020). Co-articulation is a reciprocal process, whereby entities make each other ‘more articulate’, that is, they make each other intelligible and more capable. The political question would be then how to create techniques, infrastructures, institutions, and environments that would favour life-affirming co-articulation for humans and nonhumans.

Although Morizot posits the ‘explorer’ – situated in opposition to the ‘colonizer’ – as the figure that best matches his diplomat, there is perhaps another figure that is a better fit in terms of its next of kin: the amateur. One of Morizot’s arguments against Latour’s diplomat is that this figure is too connected to institutions, understood as traditional structures of representation (Morizot, 2020: 301, n. 23). As a counter-proposal to institutions, Morizot offers the notion of resources produced by amateur-experts that are shared on the internet through blogs, forums, groups, and associations. These operate within ‘gift culture’ as vectors of sensibilization that enrich our relations to living beings, as an alternative to the ‘technocratic expertise’ that is often proposed in their stead (Morizot, 2020: 286–7). In his opinion, a diplomat is less a profession than ‘a mobile, fluent position within a multispecific field of forces’ (Morizot, 2020: 259). Indeed, diplomats are everywhere (Morizot, 2017). In this context, however, one has to ask to what extent Morizot’s diplomat implies an individual endeavour, rather than a collective practice as envisioned by Stengers and, in a more sedimented form through institutions, by Latour. Whilst Morizot’s proposal sounds enticing, it nevertheless undermines, to a certain extent, organized collectives of practices that are necessary for producing knowledge. In that sense, Morizot’s diplomat seems to be a lone tracker-amateur (pisteur-amateur) who belongs to both worlds – human and nonhuman – while, at the same time, belonging to none.

Conclusion

In Politics of Nature, Latour aptly quotes Napoleon’s famous comment about Talleyrand: a diplomat is ‘a piece of shit in a silk stocking’ (Latour, 2004: 216). Whereas Stengers and Latour actively work with this compromised heritage and turn it to their advantage, Morizot’s figure is much less ambiguous and corrupted. His diplomat encounters nonhumans with the best of intentions. This, however, does not make Morizot’s figure more convincing: he attempts, perhaps too assiduously, to eliminate the diplomat’s problematic heritage, and so move towards innocence. As postcolonial scholars argue, modern diplomacy and colonial worlds emerged coevally. Historically, diplomacy was powered by the will to ‘save’ and to govern rather than to converse with the non-European other (Opondo, 2016: n.p.). This approach is somewhat reminiscent of our contemporary attitudes towards natural worlds and our ways to tackle ecological crisis. The heritage of colonialism in diplomacy remains unexplored in all three thinkers and this, to some extent, problematizes diplomacy as the best framework to think about the futures of our relationships with nonhumans. Perhaps we already entertain a relationship of diplomacy-colonialism towards natural worlds, and therefore what we need is another conceptual figure entirely.

In this article, I have briefly sketched three companion figures to the diplomat – a heretic, a designer and an amateur – as alternative characters for thinking more-than-human worlds with Stengers, Latour and Morizot. These figures not only help us understand what is at stake in each of these philosophers but also gesture towards different types of politics. A heretic suggests a more activist approach, as she questions the established authority and puts herself at risk in a radical attempt to respond to new exigencies in the world. A designer hints at constructive but more established aspects of politics, in which institutions are created to accommodate new beings. Finally, an amateur points towards an affinity-based politics tied to individual tastes. The benefit of adding these new personae to our vocabularies is to allow us to conceptualize more effectively political practice with nonhumans. Considering the vast number of entities that the word ‘nonhuman’ encompasses, a plurality of conceptual figures that would capture specific human-nonhuman co-articulation could be productive for thinking about constructing common worlds and multispecies cohabitation. Perhaps these new conceptual personae could activate our imaginations and generate other questions that the diplomat is not in a position to pose.