terrestrials & dwelling places

In loving memory of Bruno Latour (1947-2022)

Excerpts from
Down to Earth. Politics in the New Climate Regime. Bruno Latour. Polity Press. 2018.

What makes the idea of a choice for or against anthropocentrism quite implausible is the assumption that there is a center, or rather two, man and nature, between which one supposedly must choose. And even more bizarre is the idea that this circle has such well-defined boundaries that they would leave everything else outside. As if there were an outside!

It is perhaps time, to stress this point, to stop speaking about humans and to refer instead to terrestrials (the Earthbound - coming down to Earth). Saying, “We are earthbound, we are terrestrials amid terrestrials,” does not lead to the same politics as saying, “We are humans in nature.”

Let us call it a conflict between modern humans who believe they are alone in the Holocene, in flight toward the Global or in exodus toward the Local, and the terrestrials who know they are in the Anthropocene and who seek to cohabit with other terrestrials under the authority of a power that as yet lacks any political institution.

Terrestrials, in fact, have the very delicate problem of discovering how many other beings they need to subsist. It is by making this list that they sketch out their dwelling places.

To track the terrestrials is to add conflicts of interpretation regarding what a given actor is, wants, desires, or can do, to conflicts about what other actors are, want, desire, or can do. What do you want? What are you capable of? With whom are you prepared to cohabit? Who can threaten you? We are not seeking agreement among all these overlapping agents, but we are learning to depend on them. We must agree to define a dwelling place as that on which a terrestrial depends for its survival while asking what other terrestrials also depend on it.

To define a dwelling place for a terrestrial is to list what it needs for its subsistence and, consequently, what it is ready to defend with its own life if need be. This holds true for a wolf as for a bacterium, for a business enterprise as for a forest, for a divinity as for a family. What must be documented are the properties of a terrestrial – in all the senses of the word property – by which it is possessed and on which it depends, to the extent that if it were deprived of them, it would disappear.

Existing as a terrestrial and being able to describe one’s dwelling place is one and the same thing.