“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Monday, September 23, 2013

Latour on "Progress"

Continued from the last post: I can't tell you how awkward it was to be pathologized as one of these apocalypse mongers on numerous occasions, perhaps most intensely at U Wisconsin Madison last fall. Especially since like Latour (I say it all the time, in a slightly different register), my belief is that the apocalypse has already occurred. 

I was pathologized thus simply for stating a physical fact: at the rate we are going, by 30 years from now we will have emitted five times more gigatons of carbon than is necessary to, ahem, "transform" (I believe I used a coital verb) Earth beyond all recognition.

An arche-fact, if you like, one that doesn't depend on a correlator to make it real.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

between you and i,
the punch line to this joke comes in a confession in parathethis that doubles over to the joke im about to make or is it a rethorical question????????( in an undergraduate first year seminar [as a student] written exam, i wrongly attributed a Darwin citation to Nietszche.... i was super nerdified (mortified) considering Nietzsche's injunction "above all never mistake me for someone else" [and being 20 years old!!!]

Now the joke:

If they read you at all closely shouldn't they mistake you instead for being too modern????

Van Troi Tran said...

Wasn't the idea that the apocalypse has already happened first put forward by Jean-Pierre Dupuy? Latour actually quotes him approvingly in a recent interview: http://www.franceculture.fr/emission-la-suite-dans-les-idees-anthropologie-du-futur-crise-du-futur-2013-09-07