Ethnos

Journal of Anthropology

ISSN: 0014-1844 (Print) 1469-588X (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/retn20

Anthropologists Are Talking – About Capitalism,

Ecology, and Apocalypse

Bruno Latour, Isabelle Stengers, Anna Tsing & Nils Bubandt

To cite this article: Bruno Latour, Isabelle Stengers, Anna Tsing & Nils Bubandt (2018):
Anthropologists Are Talking – About Capitalism, Ecology, and Apocalypse, Ethnos, DOI:
10.1080/00141844.2018.1457703

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2018.1457703

Published online: 10 Apr 2018.

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ETHNOS, 2018
https://doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2018.1457703

ANTHROPOLOGISTS ARE TALKING

Anthropologists Are Talking – About Capitalism, Ecology,

and Apocalypse
Bruno Latoura, Isabelle Stengersb, Anna Tsingc,d and Nils Bubandtd
a
Sciences Po (Paris Institute of Political Studies), Paris, France; bDepartment of Philosophy and Ethics,
Université Libre de Bruxelles; cDepartment of Anthropology, University of California, Santa Cruz;
d
Department of Anthropology, Aarhus University

Capitalist enterprise is transforming the world, reshaping the registers of what Félix
Guattari (2000) has called the three ecologies: namely those of the environment, of
social relations, and of human subjectivity. Put differently, the ecologies of both
humans and nonhumans are being radically made and unmade according to the
logics of capitalism. If this is true, there is a need to critically theorise, conceptualise,
and empirically study this (un)making, to bring the dynamics of capitalism and
those of human and nonhuman ecologies into the same analytical frame. This would
arguably mean reframing both what capitalism and what ecology might mean, allowing
ecological thinking to reorient the study of capitalism and new kinds of capitalist cri-
tique to infuse the study of ecological crisis. It would mean rethinking the divide
between the human and the nonhuman. Finally, it would mean questioning not only
the unity of capitalist logic and capitalist economy (Bear et al. 2015) but also the tele-
ology of capitalist history. For even though liberal and democratic capitalism is a hege-
monic political presence in the world, its status today is hardly the victory march
imagined by Francis Fukuyama and others not so long ago (Fukuyama 1992). In the
shadow of ecological and climatic crisis, capitalism has become haunted by an apoca-
lyptic overtone. The victorious end of history to many now feels more like the end of
the world. How are we to study the present in a world where the future is not what
it used to be? And what does it mean for the study of capitalism that the biggest chal-
lenge to it is not an existing ‘political other’ (such as Communism) but an ‘ecological
other’, an unknown formation sometimes called Gaia (Lovelock and Margulis 1974;
Latour 2017) and sometimes the Anthropocene? Anthropologists have taken up the
challenge of studying how the political and ecological otherwise emerges amidst the
global rubble of capitalist ruination (Helmreich 2009; Kirksey 2015; Tsing 2015;
Haraway 2016; Tsing et al. 2017). But how might we best retool the social theory of
the contemporary to this task? What theoretical renewal is needed to study both the
(un)predictability of capitalist destruction and the unexpected forms of human and
nonhuman proliferation amidst capitalist ruin and ecological change? What kinds of

CONTACT Nils Bubandt bubandt@cas.au.dk

© 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
2 B. LATOUR ET AL.

politics of hope are possible and what kinds of methods are necessary to study the
carbon-driven, accelerated environmental apocalypse of our times?

The following conversation, recorded in June 2016, addresses these issues. The recorded
interview was transcribed by Mathilde Højrup and edited by Ethnos editor Nils Bubandt
before approval by the three participants:

BRUNO LATOUR. Professor at Sciences Po, the Paris Institute of Political Studies,
where he is also scientific director of the MediáLab. For over three decades, the
publication of each of Bruno Latours’s more than two dozen books has been an
agenda-setting intervention in its own right, reshaping the way the social and
human sciences understand and study technology, science, democracy, religion,
modernity, the social, and more. Bruno Latour’s three latest books, An Inquiry
into Modes of Existence (2013b), Reset Modernity! (2016), and Facing Gaia. Eight
Lectures on the New Climatic Regime (2017) have moved his project onto new col-
laborative, experimental, and political terrain. The books address the urgent need to
redefine modernity’s relation to its own earthly grounding in light of dramatic eco-
logical change and provide the theoretical outline for how this work of redefinition
might begin.

ISABELLE STENGERS. Professor in the Department of Philosophy and Ethics at the Uni-
versité Libre de Bruxelles. Isabelle Stengers has a background in both chemistry and
philosophy and has for decades worked to promote a politically critical science that
transcends the borders of natural and human sciences. ‘Another science’, she insists
(2017), is possible. This insistence has been evident since the publication in 1984 of
her pioneering book Order out of Chaos, co-written with Nobel Prize recipient, Ilya Pri-
gogine. Several of Isabelle Stengers’ recent books, including Capitalist Sorcery: Breaking
the Spell (co-written with Pierre Pignarre, 2011) and In Catastrophic Times: Resisting the
Coming Barbarism (2015) tackle head-on the infernal and ‘sorcerous’ relationship
between capitalist logics and ecological disaster.

ANNA L. TSING. Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz

and Niels Bohr Professor of Anthropology at Aarhus University where she directs
the research project AURA (Aarhus University Research on the Anthropocene). Anna
Tsing’s detailed and thought-provoking analyses of the violent effects and unintended
consequences of capitalist schemes on co-species life-worlds have been ground-break-
ing for multispecies ethnography while simultaneously pushing the study of global
capitalism in new directions. Anna Tsing’s publications include Friction: An Ethnogra-
phy of Global Connection (2005) and the co-edited volume Arts of Living on a Damaged
Planet (2017). Her latest monograph, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the
Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (2015) received the Gregory Bateson Book prize
as well as the Victor Turner Prize in Ethnographic Writing.

Nils
I think this is the first time that the three of you are in a room together, is that right?
 ETHNOS 3

Anna
Each of us have met, but not at the same time …

Nils
In that case, this is a historical event! As well as a marvellous opportunity to probe into
some of the things you have in common, including the endeavour to study a world
where humans and nonhumans both figure. You do so in ways that very much
overlap but which also are full of productive tension or friction. For lack of a better
cover term I am referring to the common ground of your projects by the three-
headed dragon of ‘capitalism’, ‘ecology’, and ‘apocalypse’. You may end up slaying
this dragon, of course, but I trust it can nevertheless help structure the conversation.
I was hoping we could address the following three broad themes or questions in our
conversation: What is capitalism? Is the study of ecology an ally? And can apocalypse
be a useful trope?

Bruno
How much time do we have?

Nils
We have an hour or so …

Bruno
In an hour we have to do all of that? [Laughter]

Nils
We will see how far we get. Let us start with ‘capitalism’. It is a contentious word that
carries a lot of baggage. Could you say a little about how the concept of capitalism
figures in your work?
Isabelle
Who begins?

Bruno
You have to start, Isabelle! It figures more in your work.

Isabelle
Well, for me, to address the question of capitalism is a way to address the situation of
today’s world. It is a way of not forgetting Marx, and of not accepting the standard nar-
rative of capitalism as being about the free market. It is a way of addressing the logic of
capitalism, which is not to be confused with the project of particular people. But it is for
me also a way of addressing people who take Marx seriously today in a context where, I
think, there has been what I would call ‘a missed opportunity’. Félix Guattari was one of
those people who tried to connect the concerns of the green parties with those on the
left. I was myself an ally of a small party which was called VEGA or Verts pour une
gauche alternative, a Belgian green party for an alternative left that was established in
1986. Back then, however, the articulation failed to happen. In hindsight, there are of
4 B. LATOUR ET AL.

course very good historical reasons for this non-meeting, but to me it is still a missed
opportunity. One of the concerns of my book about the coming barbarity (Stengers
2015) is to try to think about capitalism in ways that address those who have inherited
this missed opportunity. Not in order to replay the past, but rather in order to look
ahead. I wrote that book in French in 2007, which is now already a long time ago
and I would probably have written it differently today. But one of the things I
thought important at the time was to come back to Marx’s story of the commons, of
their enclosure and of its link with what he called primitive accumulation, and to
abandon any teleological viewpoint – to insist on the sheer destruction this wreaked,
because there is an urgent political interest in a vision of the commons as a common
life between people who are heterogeneous but who have agreed to ‘live with and
from the same forest’, as it were. To say that capitalism may be described as exploitation
is making capitalism into a purely human question, but capitalism is also a story of
expropriation. And expropriation to me means something like what you, Anna,
mean by ‘alienation’ (Tsing 2015: 5): a being separated from what makes you alive, a
condition in which you also stop thinking, imagining, and noticing particular beings
and relations. In this sense, the story of capitalism is also a story where some people
become very – I would not say ‘clever’ but ‘productive’ – inventive in a very specialised
way on the one hand, while more and more people, on the other hand, become defined
as ‘beneficiaries’ – now even workers are said to enjoy the ‘benefit’ of a job, which they
have to ‘deserve’ it – of something made possible ‘elsewhere’, out of their reach. And this
double narrowing (of ‘what kind of people are important?’ and ‘what kind of knowledge
is important?’), I wanted to turn into a problem, because in the future – and sorry now I
am stealing your words, Anna – we have to ‘learn to live in ruins’. For this learning
process to begin, we have to recover, or reclaim the capacity for formulating our own
questions and not accepting the ready-made ones. Since the beginning of this
century, I have become very interested in the Neo-Pagan witches’ movement (Pignarre
and Stengers 2011, Stengers 2012), which is a reclaiming movement. And this idea of
‘reclaiming’ which means not only to ‘take back again’, but also ‘to heal’ is very impor-
tant, something Marxism missed when it reduced the question of capitalist critique to a
matter of becoming conscious of the lies of ideology. I think we are all, including the
‘productive’ people – those who consider themselves as thinking agents – in need of
a lot of healing. And I do not mean one great healing. No, we need as many healing
processes as there are places and figurations.

Nils
In your collaborative writings with Philippe Pignarre, you have called capitalism a kind
of sorcery (Pignarre and Stengers 2011). Do you mean ‘healing’ here as a kind of ‘anti–
sorcery’?

Isabelle
Yes exactly! In any place where a culture of sorcery exists, what matters is the art of pro-
tecting oneself against it, recognising its operation. I think that the Marxist tradition
went some way in describing the sorcerous operations of power but failed to notice
 ETHNOS 5

the whole art of its sorcery. So yes, I would say that to me the point of reclaiming is to
resist – and here I cite I think both of you, Anna and Bruno – ‘global analyses’, to mul-
tiply activist ways of reclaiming. I am not an optimist, but I think it is the only thing we
can do without dreaming.

Nils
Bruno, you have called capitalism ‘not a thing in the world, but a certain way of being
affected when trying to think through this strange mixture of miseries and luxuries we
encounter’ (Latour 2014a).

Bruno
Well, if I use the expression ‘capitalism’, it is because I have borrowed it. I have always
been diffident about great narratives of capitalism because they globalize very fast. It
means we systematise things which are not that systematic. We thereby end up natur-
alising things which are not natural and have a very short history. I have approached
practical questions about what others call ‘capitalism’ through three entries. One is
the ‘sociology of economics’ which I learned from my STS colleagues. This entry is
an attempt to find a handle on what is called ‘capitalism’ in its effects by following
all the little procedures by which we have become ‘persons of accounting’, basically fol-
lowing how all of this technology of accounting spread (Callon and Muniesa 2005). This
entry moves away from a Marxist argument, but still seeks to study how you calculate
‘value’, ‘labour value’. The second entry grows out of the shock of ‘the ecology argu-
ment’ (Latour 2004). I remember once that Anna and I were in a panel together,
Anna was asked by someone in the audience: ‘What agent of history will replace the
worker fighting capitalism?’ Anna’s delightful answer was: ‘I think we have had
enough great agents of history, maybe we do not want another one.’ The answer com-
pletely deflated the implied argument of the question that the figure of the worker fight-
ing capitalism was being replaced by the figure of the heroic ecologist fighting
capitalism. So, I think we share the idea that what we are witnessing is more like an
involution or a redistribution. The idea of ‘fighting the system of capitalism’ gives
too much to the ‘it’. The notion invents the enemy, as it were. Indeed, it is ironic
how the great narrative of the unity of capitalism, the indissolubility of capitalism, is
historically shared for much of the nineteenth and twentieth century by the proponents
and the enemies of capitalism. But now, I think, I am experimenting with a third entry.
It is an entry which is also actually due to Anna’s work. This entry is concerned with the
appropriation of the land. So through my interest in religious theological arguments, my
question has come be: Why is it that we invented a way of not being of the Earth (Latour
2017)? This invention is, of course, linked to some very systematic practices which
Donna Haraway and others have taught us to recognise as the ‘plantation system’
(Haraway 2016; Haraway et al. 2016). The ‘Plantationocene’ is therefore for me a
more productive concept than the ‘Capitalocene’, as coined by Moore and others
(Moore 2016) even though it was at some point a nice alternative to the Anthropocene.
Plantationocene is productive because it refers to a certain, historically specific, way of
appropriating the land, namely an appropriation of land as if land was not there. The
6 B. LATOUR ET AL.

Plantationocene is a historical ‘de-soilization’ of the Earth. And it is striking how much

analytical work is now needed to re-localise, to re-territorialise and re-earth, to ‘re-
ground’, basically, practice. What is needed, I think, is an inversion of materialism.
For capitalism was supposed to be purely materialist but suddenly we read in it a com-
pletely idealistic idea of what the world is made of. It is – and this is a metaphor that
Isabelle uses as well – as if we were extracted from a point of view which is of
nowhere, basically. And this idea of the nowhere is shared by the notion of utopia.
So for me – and here I may differ from Isabelle – the absolute enemy is utopia
because in the dream of utopia, that place of nowhere, there is a perverse link
between capitalism and its enemies. This is no doubt a reflection of my French back-
ground but, as I see it, the perverse pleasure of losing to an enemy that is bigger has
shaped the entire attitude of the left. It is this perverse pleasure – and here I agree
with you, Isabelle – that has completely broken the missed opportunity of the left.
Well, it is more than that in fact: it is an explosion of what should have been the
task of the green parties, namely to address the social questions of the nineteenth
century in a new register. That task was completely atomised by something perverse
in the very notion of capitalism. For me, it would be very interesting to understand
better how this happened. But the historical outcome of this failure has been that
there is now a whole re-grounding move looking around for ecological parties that
can shoulder that task. But we do not see them, because they are gone. So it is in the
midst of this strange moment of change that I have become so interested in what I
call ‘the third attractor’, and which I mentioned at the lecture last night.1 But I am
not going to bother you with …

Anna
No, please tell us about the third attractor! [Laughter]

Bruno
The third attractor is the Earth as soil (Latour forthcoming). It is the discovery that
modernization was without the soil. These ‘soil-less’ moderns are strange, because
they are people who exactly prided themselves of being materialists and of being
‘down-to-earth’ … a pretty funny expression, when you think about it, because there
is no soil in this modernist idea of being ‘factually down to earth’! This abstract view
of what-it-is-to-be is of course all about ‘being-for-the-future’. As Anna has shown
(Tsing 2015), the practices in the plantation of cutting and pruning are very much
organised by this temporal idea of the future as a path of progress, an obsession with
the future of which Marx also wrote. But, still, Marx could not have imagined the
level of ‘de-grounding’ that has come to define the development of the twentieth
century.

Isabelle
Just imagine Marx learning, before he died, that at this time in this situation we would
still discuss Capital (Marx 2013). It would be a nightmare for him! Because he was an
inventive man. I mean, he worked in his time, and with what mattered in his time.
 ETHNOS 7

Bruno
Right!

Isabelle
I would like to come back to what you said earlier, Bruno. I am not a utopian. But
what I hold on to, and what I would take from Guattari, is that we are living in a
situation of ecological devastation both of the environment and of social and
mental ecologies (Guattari 2000). In this situation, anybody who says: ‘We know
that people are unable to do that’ or ‘people will never accept that’ are taking dev-
astation as their ground for argumentation. My position is not utopian, but I want to
hold on to a basic kind of ignorance: we still do not know what people are able to do.
So those people who reject action by saying that ‘it has already been tried’, those
people are the enemy to me. The proximate enemies, I mean. I want to reclaim
the insight of those who explore what people together are capable of achieving in
concrete situations and on concrete issues from the starting point that the environ-
ment makes us ill.

Anna
Right.

Nils
Anna, might one say that your work on capitalism also seeks to capture its sorcerous
potential to be ‘other’ all the time? Your work suggests that capitalism is neither
what we tend to think it is (Bear et al. 2015), nor what it used to be (Tsing 2015). In
an outsourced, decentralised Walmart-style capitalism, homogeneity as an economic
logic has been replaced by heterogeneity as a strategy, in which marginal gains are
made not in spite of but through and across difference. Capitalism in your work
seems to promote, thrive, and hide in cultural difference as well as in the differences
between human and nonhuman.

Bruno
In niches …

Anna
Well, I have had to think about why I want to hold on to this word ‘capitalism’, and I
think it is related to what Isabelle just said about challenging those who think that it has
all been tried before and nothing can change. At least in U.S. context, the word ‘capit-
alism’ holds on to a certain critical edge that allows one to say that the kind of economic
common sense that we are forced to live with every day is not the only possibility. I hold
on to capitalism as a kind of a tool to make the point that big systemic changes are poss-
ible, and some of the things that we think of as set in stone are actually quite recent. As
Bruno was saying, I also think of it very specifically in a landscape sense. I like very
much your idea of the lack of soil. I think of this kind of dangerous modernist abstrac-
tion from the soil through the figure of long-distance investors who have never been in a
place and still have the incredible power to change the ecology completely in those
8 B. LATOUR ET AL.

places, to reimagine it as a place for just one kind of resource, whether it is something
that is there, or something that is not there but which they are going to put there. The
ability of those investors to shape the fate of whatever kind of assemblage that is juxta-
posed there – to change it completely, to wipe it out – is an effect that we have to be
willing to look at in a relationship between ‘the far-off’ and ‘the close-to’ in order to
understand. The term ‘capitalism’ helps me to try to look at those big and small
effects together in any specific place. So, I understand what you are saying about
how it is very easy to use the word capitalism to imagine an already constituted
globe. But maybe the critical possibilities of the term ‘capitalism’ in pushing against
common sense are still useful in getting us to grasp how any local bunch of grass
that happens to be growing in a particular place is intimately linked to these long-dis-
tance movements of money, capital, property rights, and law. All of those things come
together in particular places in specific constellations and with specific reality effects.
Going back to your sense of urgency and crises, Bruno, we are not going to have a
chance as long as we allow only those who claim their right to transfer money
around to be the only ones to have a say. However, as you were saying, Nils, I do
not think that is the only thing that is going on in the world. How to hold on to
both, then? I do think we are in a catastrophic kind of situation where we have
allowed the rights and perspectives of investors to go crazy. At the same time, I also
think we have to look at all of the heterogeneity that is coming up, and the stuff that
is still coming up, despite the best attempts of investors to completely wipe out
places …

Bruno
‘Still’? Living in the ruins, you mean? You are arguing for something, I have to say,
Anna, that is pretty depressing … [Laughter]

Anna
I know.

Bruno
Because before there was at least ‘something’. I mean there used to be a revolutionary
movement. And there was something like adaptation and resilience. Now we are shift-
ing to the next step, which is living in the ruins. I do not mean to forget, as you both
said, that there are many opportunities in these ruins. And yet, for me this politics of
living in ruins is difficult to absorb. It is especially more difficult now because the
massive movement everywhere is to go back to identity politics. This movement
entails an abandonment: there is no globe and the horizon of capitalism is sort of
gone in a way. I wonder how living in ruins aligns with that movement of shrinkage
and I worry.
Anna
Right.
 ETHNOS 9

Bruno
The most amazing example of this shrinkage is Brexit, the British withdrawal from the
European Union, because it was the English who invented the global. Those guys
invented capitalism.

Anna
Right.

Isabelle
And they now they just want to keep their …

Bruno
They are essentially saying: ‘Why do we not remain an island?’ I think that this, and the
fact that it happens now, is the most extraordinary ethnological event. The English want
to go back to being a completely uninteresting small island, return to what they were
before they invented capitalism.
Anna
Well, of course, the Americans who want to build a wall around the entire country are in
a similar state of shrinkage.

Bruno
Yes, it is the same everywhere. The French all want to be Front National. Maybe only
Belgium is exempt from this. But perhaps it is because they are already so divided, they
cannot imagine where to go back to …
Isabelle
We are not utopian! Because there is no salvation for Belgium … [Laughter]

Nils
On the one hand, capitalism does not exist. On the other hand, it produces socio-eco-
logical ruins with no outside. That sounds particularly depressing.

Anna
Can I say something quickly to that? When I use that term ‘non-capitalist’, it is partly in
a classic sense of value-making, namely in the sense that ‘the outside’ has to do with the
logics that Bruno is talking about. You know: ‘Is there soil or is there not soil?’. It is
going to be pretty hard to find a non-capitalist place, but non-capitalist value
systems are everywhere! What makes those non-capitalist value systems so interesting
for anthropologists, among others, is that they show us that there are other possibilities.
They are essential to the project of insisting that the kind of common sense that the
modern mode of existence is the only way, which certain kinds of powerful institutions
want us to take for granted, is NOT all that is going on.

Bruno
We should keep in mind that capitalism is not efficient without this added little thing:
modernization. If capitalism was merely a mode of organising the market in multiple
10 B. LATOUR ET AL.

ways, then you could simply dissolve capitalism by dissolving market arrangements in
its thousand ways of being capitalist, in China, in India, etc. But it is the modernization
front, which is really the poison inside this arrangement. Because when anyone who is
opposed to a decision to plant and produce this or that thing can be marked as ‘back-
ward’, then you have paralysed the enemy. This is how the sorcery of modernity oper-
ates through capitalism.
Isabelle
It seems to me that we are in a moment of deep unknown. For while the modernization
front is still working, the idea of progress – and the belief in what you might call efficient
capitalism – is no longer persuasive even in its own terms. This means that the mod-
ernization front has become dismembered. Nobody really means to modernise the
people who work in Pakistani sweat-shops. Nobody means for them to go to school
and abandon their traditional beliefs. All they are meant to do is continue working
according to schedule. The same with the Oregon pickers in Anna’s book (Tsing
2015): their freedom no longer has a modern flavour. It seems to me that we are
facing a future where capitalism is already living in its own ruins. Maybe we are not
living in ruins, but capitalism already is.

Bruno
The coal industry is a clear case of capitalism living in its own ruins.
Anna
Yes!

Bruno
King Coal must be defended, as Donald Trump has been insisting. And yet the money
keeps flowing out. It is an interesting case in which capitalism itself is destroying one of
its major industries.

Anna
I would like to try out, if we could tell, a similar story about the ambivalent unifications
of modernization on the subject of science, which both of you have had a lot to say
about. On the one hand, science has been this unifying force pulling together all
kinds of knowledge and creating a monolithic kind of knowledge. On the other hand
– and in the much the same ways we were talking about capitalism at this moment –
there has been lots of fragmented and multiple kinds of science-making that both of
you have been involved with in lots of different ways which undermine the promises
of the modern project of progress and Man. I would be interested if you would
follow up on the kinds of thoughts you were having here about modernization – if
instead of capitalism you were thinking of it in terms of trajectories of something we
might call science.

Nils
This brings us nicely onto the second topic of this conversation: Can the science of
ecology be an ally? The work of all three of you seems to suggest that – in spite of
 ETHNOS 11

the otherwise strong alliance between natural science and what Bruno calls ‘the moder-
nizing front’ – it is now possible, perhaps even critical, for the social and human
sciences to uncover potential allies in the natural sciences, natural history, ecology,
and biology. Do you agree?

Bruno
My version of what Isabelle has been doing for years is to insist that science has been
kidnapped by epistemology (Stengers 2017).

Isabelle
I think that the sciences that became synonymous of progress in the nineteenth century
– and which were what I would call ‘fast sciences’ already then – are extractive sciences.
Chemists, for instance, used to be artisans, craftsmen. They were working with semi-
purified compounds and recipes and had to practise Anna’s art of noticing. But the
extractive, purified objects of chemistry – which nineteenth century industry produced,
and which could enter into protocols which everybody could follow – produced a fast
science that had nothing to say any longer to the old craftsmen. It was contemporary
with big industry, not small industry. And I would say that this isolation, this new
kind of environment for the now academic chemists, is as important as epistemology!
I think that scientists came to think that speed was the essence.

Bruno
Yes, I agree.

Isabelle
I think that this problem of epistemology is really a consequence of the practices of fast
science: ‘Leave us alone, we are scientists, and science must advance.’ Everything that
complicates it, makes obstacles and brings back the mess of the world is an enemy.
That, too, is the front of modernization!

Bruno
But scientists are actually interesting people doing something else. We might not always
agree with what they are doing, because sometimes they insist on being stupid and
boring. Now, however, I think there is a chance, because natural scientists realise
that they are in a very different situation. For me the key event here has been climate
change. I was in meeting the other day and one of the climate scientists came to me
and said: ‘Bruno we need your help!’ I said: ‘I am a relativist, how do you want me
to help you?!’ [Laughter].

Bruno
I am interested in geo-scientists, because they do not operate with an epistemology of
the globe. It is not a science of the globe, it is a highly local, pluralised, multiple kind of
science (Latour 2014b). They are as lost as everybody. And this pluralised, localised
history is close to a Humboldtian definition of natural science; ‘natural history’ it
was called after all. So, we are back to natural history in a way. The prime is that scien-
tists themselves are now lost. This means that they become complicit in the crimes, so to
12 B. LATOUR ET AL.

speak. Or, perhaps, allies in the definition of different cosmologies. I think that, in a
way, it is one of the slight advantages of being in the ruins; it demands a new kind of
dialogue with science:
Okay now, don’t tell me all these things about the universe and or the sciences. No, instead, tell
your friends and your enemies where you are! Ah, you want a world where there is no climate
change by humans, fine! But where is it? Where is it? In Texas?

Texas, of all places, is now investing in wind energy more than in anything else.

Nils
The kind of specificity that you point to here also motivates the collaborative efforts of
biologists and anthropologists in AURA (Aarhus University Research on the Anthropo-
cene).2 Based on a shared heritage in field science, AURA seeks to cultivate a common –
‘ecological’ – interest amongst biologists and anthropologists in specific relations
between multiple kinds of humans and multiple kinds of nonhumans in specific
places or landscapes.

Anna
Right! I think I was attracted to mycology, the study of fungi, in part because it is a field
science. I was attracted to the way in which all the complications of the places – and the
kinds of knowledge that the scientists have – are so tied to their actual experience in the
field rather than to abstractions. I thought it might be interesting to talk about that
question of the revival of natural history that you guys were talking about a minute
ago because there are some real pleasures in the curiosity of being in the field and apply-
ing common methods to understand it that have been coming up in the AURA team for
both the humanists and the scientists. All of us, human scientists and natural scientists,
enjoy going out there and looking at stuff, and yet both sides are absolutely terrified of
it. So, the scientists absolutely admit to the pleasure of going out and describing things,
trying to figure out what is going on. But then when it comes to publications, that is
where those epistemological terrors come in: ‘Is this material publishable?’ We have
had a huge problem there. The humanists also enjoy going out there but they get
into the same kinds of panic over what kinds of professional stakes they would have
in it. This panic is about how one collaborates with natural science in a genuine way
without losing the critical stakes of human science, how collaboration can co-exist
with the kinds of gaps that you were talking about. It is also a concern that the scientists
do not want to have conversations with the vernacular kinds of knowledges in which
anthropologists are interested. For their own part, however, the humanists themselves
do not really want to have conversations with scientific knowledge.

Isabelle
Exactly!

Anna
My point is that the gaps and possibilities and pleasures arise in particular in the field,
precisely for the reasons that you have been talking about: because it is ‘soil-rich’
 ETHNOS 13

experience, just in the way that you, Bruno, have been describing ‘soil’. The pleasures of
this kind of collaboration with science are very much grounded in a common experi-
ence of the pleasures of noticing this soil, but also of noticing the particular set of
relationships that they are part of in doing the investigation.

Bruno
That is why I am so obsessed by the geo-scientists – by my ‘critical zone-ists’ – because
their solution is to transform the field into a lab for the equipment. They have no
problem about publishing, they publish masses of papers. But their field research
concern is with the classical version of the equipment. And because of the presence
of others in these critical zones that they study – marihuana planters in California or
farmers in France – the kind of extractive science that Isabelle was talking about is ren-
dered much more difficult. In the last 20 years, there has been a complete transform-
ation of chemistry and other natural sciences in its relation to controversies. And I
think this is especially true of geo-chemistry, for whom – when they sit down with
their necessary corps of technical agronomists, technical advisors as well as, of
course, big companies that enable their field – the chain between them becomes
highly visible.

Bruno
For decades, we have fought – Isabelle much more than me but I have done so, too – the
bifurcation of nature and culture because it was a way to dismiss multiple alternative forms
of knowledge. Now, however, it is much more difficult for all of these natural historians in
these critical zones to decide whether what they study is scientific or not scientific. These
scientists cannot ignore: ‘it is an Anthropocene!’ Again, it is one of the great advantages of
the Anthropocene: it makes the argument for us, it speeds up the argument for us. Of
course, there are many dangers with the word ‘Anthropocene’, but it does have an impor-
tant quality to it in that it allows, pushes even, the renewal of natural history which is also
about the abandonment of the possibility of relying epistemologically on the notion of a
bifurcation and of dismissing other forms of knowledge.
Anna
That is interesting.

Bruno
Also because the idea of progress is largely abandoned. It has happened for some time in
medicine. And what has been true for medicine is now also true for agriculture. Take
what is happening in Bourgogne. It is amazing: everyone is now seriously doing bio-
dynamics. I mean, even my family, they talk seriously about bio-dynamics! [Laughter]

Bruno
I would never have imagined that just five years ago! But it points to a larger issue: There
was a line of progress that you had to move along … until it was suddenly possible to
dismiss it. And now that line of progress as inevitability is gone, basically. That is a com-
pletely new situation.
14 B. LATOUR ET AL.

Nils
What happens ‘after progress’? Might this be a good place to move on to the third ques-
tion: Can apocalypse be a useful trope?
Isabelle
Yes.

Nils
It seems to me that the work of all three of you operates within the register of what
Michael Taussig calls ‘preemptively apocalyptic thinking’ (Taussig 2009:14). One
gleans an attempt to experiment with apocalypse as a trope in the recent publications
of all of three of you – Anna’s book The Mushroom at the End of the World, Bruno’s
book Facing Gaia, and Isabelle’s book In Catastrophic Times. They seem to me to con-
stitute a set of overlapping attempts to play with novel kinds of temporal thinking – and
implied in this also alternative kinds of politics – that lie ‘beyond’ the temporality and
politics of progress and hope. A kind of temporality that also breaks with the future-
thinking of conventional social theory. If utopia is the enemy, as you put it earlier,
Bruno, can apocalypse be a friend? Would you agree that apocalyptic thinking is
helpful for you in imagining alternative kinds of critical temporalities and critical
politics?

Bruno
We should not forget that the idea of preemptive apocalyptic thinking grows out of the
Book of Isaiah in the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Old Testament, and was activated
in the social sciences by the Austrian philosopher Günther Anders (1902–1992) in
response to the spectre of nuclear war (see Muller and Anders 2016).

Isabelle
Jean-Pierre Dupuy calls it catastrophisme éclairé – enlightened catastrophism (Dupuy
2010).

Bruno
For me, the theological aspect is absolutely central here. For the reason why the
moderns are so utterly insensitive to the fact they have no Earth – and this is really a
long interpretation of Eric Voegelin’s political theology (Voegelin 1987) – is exactly
that moderns believe they live after the apocalypse. The apocalypse has already
passed! And, of course, the American version of this post-apocalyptic theme is that
their nation is already saved. Nothing can happen to them, because the apocalypse is
already finished. Modernism is an entitlement that cannot possibly be undone.

Isabelle
And what is happening can therefore not be thought …

Bruno
Exactly! The news does not sink in, as it were. And this informs climate scepticism,
because these people are ‘after the apocalypse’ for reasons that Voegelin studied
 ETHNOS 15

under the notion of Gnosticism. This is the notion that there is an ‘after’ the apocalyptic
time, which is by necessity ‘now’, in which you are saved. This is actually a very un-
Christian idea, and it is precisely this perverse invention which is at the heart of Gnosti-
cism. So there is a technique, a strong technical argument, behind the history of indif-
ference. So Dupuy’s simplified rational counter-argument – and maybe Taussig’s, too, I
do not know – is to say: ‘No, the apocalypse is now!’ This also implies, of course, that it
is only if you are in the ‘now’ of the apocalypse that you can open your soul to action. If
you are not in the ‘now’ of the apocalypse, you are either indifferent because you believe
you are ‘after’, or you are in ignorance of the apocalypse because you are ‘before’ it. So
the political theology of the counter-argument is to say that it is a very dangerous pos-
ition to be ‘after’ the apocalypse, because then nothing can happen to you. You can be
indifferent!
Isabelle
End of story! [Laughter]

Bruno
End of story! My reading of this political theology was renewed very deeply by Pope
Francis 2015 encyclical letter on climate change (Pope Francis 2015), because that is
exactly his argument. I think it is an extremely powerful argument to link apocalypse,
ecology and poverty. That is dynamite … booom! And the fact that this came from the
Vatican is quite extraordinary. It really is an extraordinary text, completely original.

Isabelle
And many people loved that text. It is a text people understand, even though it is a com-
plicated text that links many hitherto disparate topics. But that is the point of what you
call religious words: mixing what has not been mixed.

Bruno
It is a very important text.

Nils
We are ‘in’ the apocalypse?

Isabelle
I come to this from somewhere else. In large part, I think, because of my familiarity with
science-fiction. What opens my imagination is not political theology but science-fiction.
Science-fiction is one of those fields where human-nonhuman technique is applied in
just that imaginative way that Bruno was talking about.

Bruno
I have never understood that and I know Isabelle despairs of me for it.
Isabelle
Yes! [Laughter]
16 B. LATOUR ET AL.

Bruno
But I would still hold that the difference between catastrophism and apocalypse is
essentially religious.
Isabelle
To me that is not the main point. To me the problem in apocalypse is its link with truth.
That link is no doubt very complicated and ambivalent, but apocalypse is linked to truth
in a way that sits very poorly with environmental and climate crisis. Because environ-
mental and climate changes have brought us into a situation where there is no truth
whatsoever: We did not know how unstable the climate regime we took for granted
was. We thought we had time, only to discover that we have messed with something
that is much more precarious than we believed.

Bruno
So how do you get out of that Angst? The apocalypse is supposed to be what takes you
out of the Angst.

Isabelle
Well, that is what I do not like about the concept of the Anthropocene as a form of
apocalypse. Because, no: we are not ‘a geological force’ (pace Steffen, Crutzen, and
McNeill 2007). We are a power of disturbance, not a force of anything.

Bruno
No more agents of history. We all agree on that.

Isabelle
There is for me no symmetry at all between destroying and regenerating, those are two
completely different things. You can destroy without knowing. Generating, regenerat-
ing, is a matter of fostering and learning, noticing and all of that, everything that
destroying does not entail. Destroying is merely a matter of extracting. I find science
fiction useful here. Take David Brin’s story Existence, a story that begins in 2050 and
finishes at the end of the century (Brin 2012). Or Donna Haraway’s interspecies fable
The Camille Story, Children of Compost which covers five generations (Haraway
2016). The point of such science-fictional stories is the near-future, but a near-future
that is unknown. Is this near-future and its generations that are of concern to me. I
am a pragmatist and I do not think that apocalypse will help the coming generations
– they will become used to live in an insecure, precarious world. The unknown is
how will they live with precariousness. We cannot pretend to know the future but we
can ask the question: What can we leave to these generations? We cannot leave them
anything but ruins. They will have to go on living in ruins, because there is no other
possibility. Gaia is here to stay. We will not be able to continue to build extractive
monuments to ourselves and ignore Gaia. What matters for me is what we can learn
and experience today, which might make sense for them, help them resist the
poisons that keep being concocted at a quasi-industrial scale.
 ETHNOS 17

Bruno
How will you solve the question of ‘where you are in time’ with science fiction? It seems
to me you have to ‘re-clock’ time in order to address the anxiety which unaddressed
leads to denial, indifference and despair.

Isabelle
I do not know. But what I do know is that when I address activists, I never downplay the
ruins in question, and it seems that this leads not to despair but actually to a common
feeling of being more alive. So, I would say with Donna Haraway that we need new nar-
ratives, not new happy-ending narratives but narratives that resist the idea that ‘people
are unable to do anything else.’ A friend of mine, more than 10 years ago, had to answer
the anxious questions of his very young son who had just seen a documentary on TV
about the climate. He felt the words leaving his lips – ‘we are busy trying to do some-
thing about it’ – and felt that he was committed by these words, that he would not
betray them. Since then he is very, very busy indeed.

Bruno
But that is exactly an apocalyptic turn, to be in time and therefore in a position of possi-
bility to be against the length of time, against the idea of duration imbedded in practices
of progress. It is to be against catastrophism!

Isabelle
It is to be against catastrophism for sure. That is why I said, there is no truth in
climate change because what interests me is how to tell stories of enabling entangle-
ments. What kind of stories do we tell about how enabling can be generative? What
this means is that when you start noticing, you also meet other people who notice
something else. This is what happens when Western activists, who notice some
things meet up with Indian First Nations people who notice in different ways. This
actually leads to a generative change, to a different kind of politics. So, to tell those
stories is for me a way of avoiding ‘the business-as-usual epistemology’ which only
leaves them with the malediction: ‘We knew everything and we did nothing. Sorry,
but then people are like that!’

Bruno
That is catastrophism!

Isabelle
Yes, that is catastrophism! And its hegemony entails the danger that we will end up
being the most hated and despised generation in history. The problem with that is
that despising the previous generation is a poison! You are not nourished by despising
your parents.

Anna
Can you explain to me how you see the contrast between the apocalyptic and the cat-
astrophic, because I have not gotten my mind there yet.
18 B. LATOUR ET AL.

Bruno
Isabelle does not need the apocalypse because she talks in an apocalyptic way!

Isabelle
OK, then, I am apocalyptic …

Anna
I see.

Bruno
Apocalypse means ‘uncovering’ or revelation, of course. But apocalypticism is not a rev-
elation because it is not a message. Rather, it is an attitude which precisely takes out the
poison of the accusation and the doom and the responsibility. It is a turn that seeks to
take the poison out of catastrophism.

Nils
The concept of Anthropocene is often linked closely to the problems and politics of cat-
astrophism (Hamilton, Bonneuil, and Gemenne 2015). Are you suggesting something
different here: that the Anthropocene is perhaps better linked to the unfulfilled
promise of a kind of apocalypticism?

Bruno
Well, I will not go that far. I probably have a somewhat more positive definition of the
Anthropocene than Isabelle, because I see the concept more like a bull in a china shop –
in French we say ‘like a dog in a game of skittles’ (comme un chien dans un jeu de
quilles). What I mean is that the arrival of the concept Anthropocene has modified and
pushed around everything in incongruous and interesting ways. It is not a great
concept, but I am more positive. Now apocalypse. Of course, there are many reasons
not to use the word ‘apocalypse’. But there is one good reason: If the deniers think they
are on the wrong site of the apocalypse. This goes back to what I talked about earlier,
namely the strong link between modernisation and the idea that the apocalypse has
passed; the sense that ‘we are entitled, we are the city on the hill’, even in a warming world.

Anna
I think this is incredibly interesting, and let me say first how much I loved it when you,
Bruno, talked about the apocalyptic in the Gaia lectures (Latour 2013a). For me those
lectures were a revelation. Because I had until then always experienced the term ‘apoc-
alypse’ as a punishment. It was used to tell people: ‘You cannot go there because you are
being apocalyptic!’. And being apocalyptic was not amenable to being an academic in
many ways. And then you come along in these lectures and say: ‘Yes okay, apocalyptic
is a trope. But why not use that trope?’ For me it was a real moment of emancipation!
So, I really first want to thank you for that. At the same time, I also wonder if it is not
possible to use apocalypticism in the description of concrete entanglements across mul-
tiple places and temporalities. Entanglements that are not just one kind of time and yet
can be quite terrible. The example that came to mind for me when you were talking
about the apocalypse is one of the multiple temporal coordinations that are currently
 ETHNOS 19

being undone: Red knot birds fly many thousands of miles on their migration between
the Arctic and South America. On their way, they stop at the Chesapeake Bay, where
they feed on horseshoe crab eggs to replenish their journey. Without this replenish-
ment, they will likely not survive the long migration. But because humans have
decided – well, certain kinds of industrial capitalists have decided – to harvest the horse-
shoe crabs in quantities that have made the horseshoe crabs increasingly rare, that red
knot bird population is threatened and likely to go extinct (Tsing et al. 2017). You know,
that is a pretty apocalyptic thing from the point of view of the bird, an apocalypse that
has to do with these fine-scale entanglements across space and time. So, it seems to me
that one can talk about these temporal coordinations and their unmaking in exactly the
way you are arguing. The register of apocalypticism allows us also to notice the terrify-
ing consequences, at many levels and across many worlds, of contemporary ecological
and climatic change; consequences which we should not hold back from noticing.

Bruno
Apocalypticism is a way of alerting to these things at the same time as it allows you to
take the poison out of despair. This is a double movement that we all have to learn to
perform when we are teaching. I am teaching at the moment and have never had to deal
with this experience in quite this way before. I have to tell the bad news to these kids in
natural science who are blissfully ignorant of anything that is coming from the social
sciences and I simultaneously have to be careful not to infect them with despair. And
that is a new situation.

Notes
1. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v = ZG2TfzV7YgU
2. See http://anthropocene.au.dk

Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

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