McKenzie Wark offers a detailed criticism of Bruno Latour: Occupy Earth (2017).
The inhuman is a bundle of flesh-tech agencies that are also called labor, working in-and-against nature, producing the appearance of a world apart from nature, yet always extruded from it and venting back toward it. Other kinds of life may do much the same. The only reason to make (in)human labor a central concept is that it is (part) of who we are. It’s the situated thought of the labor point of view.
Science has to admit that it is always political, but politics need not confront the possibility that it is always dependent on some inhuman field of forces to generate the surplus with which it plays.
Latour is never very clear about what Gaia intrudes into. It does not seem adequate to say it intrudes into the political as understood in Hobbes. Rather, it intrudes into a world made of what Benjamin Bratton calls the stack, that layered, global infrastructure that sucks resources in at one end as if they were objects and puts them at the disposal of what it addresses as subjects at the other, then dumping the waste back anywhere it can.
The stack now runs on about seventeen terrawatts a day, not a negligible amount of energy. This inhuman assemblage of flesh with tech, capital against labor, has created (but can also detect) changes in ocean acidity, previously unknown compounds, ruins of vast infrastructures, underground and atmospheric nuclear tests, a rise in atmospheric carbon, mass extinction — all of that is now coming into view.
The moderns believed they could do away with religion, but as they of all people should know — believing does not make it so. For the moderns, (“these people” as he calls us), nature became a god. Here Latour comes close to Williams: “Nature, despite its reputation of incontrovertibility, is the most obscure concept there is.” But then he flattens nature back into just one of its multiform senses. Nature as the god of the moderns is unique and universal, for a people without a place.
“We haven’t finished absorbing the diversity of ways of occupying the Earth. The Anthropocene is first of all the opportunity to listen seriously at last to what anthropology teaches us about other ways of composing worlds — without depriving us, nevertheless, of the sciences, which are radically different only in the epistemological version.” But the sciences have to acknowledge the sovereignty of anthropology, its version of earth, and no other form of knowledge of it will be recognized.
Can there be a way of negotiating among multiple and not just human actors when only human actors play them? Can there really be a pluralism when it is forced onto the monolithic ground of a western politics of space and an anthropological conception of difference?
Latour challenges the sovereignty of modern mode of existence, but in doing so tries to make another one sovereign. He appears to subsume the sciences within a ground that gives priority to the anthropological, but the indigenous or the colonized never rise above the footnotes.