Cosmopolitics

This article provides an ethnographic response to the statement that soy kills (“la soja mata”), a refrain often repeated by campesino activists living on the edge of Paraguay’s rapidly expanding soybean frontier. In the context of Paraguay’s modernization projects since the 1960s, statements like these were easily disqualified as irrational or nonmodern. In the process, the political importance and analytic potential of the beans were dismissed, and so, too, were the lives and analyses of rural activists. And yet the activists with whom I worked managed, over the course of five years of court battles, to bring killer beans before the courts and to have them recognized as a force in Paraguayan politics. In so doing, they also opened up an analytic position for ethnography, allied with Isabelle Stengers’s cosmopolitics, which emerges from a situation of mutually enacting responses, rather than as a mediator of relationships between beings included or excluded from the political territory by the criteria of modernity.

Recent papers by prominent scholars in science and technology studies (notably JohnLaw and Bruno Latour) have crystallized a fundamental disagreement about the scope and purpose of intervention in actor-network theory or what we here choose to bracket as empirical philosophy. While the precept of agnostic description is taken as a given, the desired eff ects of such descriptions are highly debated: Is the goal to interfere with the singularity of the real through the enactment of multiple and possibly conflicting ontologies? Or is it (also) to craft new and comprehensive common worlds supported by notions of due process and parliamentary procedure? In this paper we think about this disagreement as a question of research strategy (a normative discord about the desirable outcome of an intervention) in order to assess its implications for research tactics (a descriptive accord about the practical crafting of an adequate account). A key point here is to challenge the impermeability of such a division and show how the strategic dispute, if to be taken seriously, invariably spills over to swamp the level of tactics. To illustrate this point, we draw upon materials from our recent doctoral research projects and to facilitate the discussion we make two deliberate caricatures: Firstly, we operate with a simplifi ed history of actor-network theory in which a strategy of epistemological critique has been replaced by two contending agendas for ontological intervention. Secondly, we address these two contending agendas as distinct options which map on to the positions of our two main interlocutors. In doing so, it becomes possible to compare their respective tactical implications as we work through two examples of what might constitute an empiricist intervention.

""This article proposes to establish some basic elements of reflection with which to build a political geography of the environment. Since its establishment as a national school, French geography never really succeeded in taking into consideration the fundamentally political environmental question, or to consider it as an ontologically integral part of its field of action. This remains true despite contemporary environmental stakes. Firstly, because French geographers have had a tendency to reluctantly abandon the idea that, in contradistinction to other disciplines, such as ecology, they maintain a certain objective distance from their object of study. Then, because the discipline did not succeed in capitalizing on its own knowledge about the environment, whilst other disciplines, such as biology, found renewed visibility by this means. Even when French geographers have been interested in the question, they all too often left out critical reflection on nature policies or on the heuristic tensions between nature/culture, remaining within a perspective in line with the historical corpus of the discipline. However, we argue that post-determinism and globalisation impose an in-depth revision of the epistemological groundings of the discipline.

Biodiversity conservation, as an experimental zone between new paradigms and the emergence of a new space of cosmopolitic action clearly illustrates this necessity. Because, for a long time, conservation re-inscribed the oppositions between ecology and geography, in their respective manners of managing space and in their relations to the political, geographers have barely studied this domain of activity. Conservation is however historically trans-sected by entirely geographical phenomena. Inscribed within development policies, conservation became transnational and local at the same time. In its shifting from a natural enclave to the political arena, conservation can also be thought of as a place of experimentation of new ways of inhabiting the world, that are both post-natural and post-national. Concurrently, processes of globalization and questions of global change have imposed a new conceptual field made of disjunctions, hybridization, interdependences and interrelationships. We can argue that a new field of experiences and of global and individual responsibilities has opened. Engaging with these new spaces of action, requires us to adopt an epistemological shift that takes us beyond the nation state and the nature/culture dichotomy. This shift might be thought of as one that gives rise to a new political geography of the environment, a cosmopolitic geography.

Keywords: political geography, environment, conservation, ecology, dualism, nature, culture, cosmopolitics, globalization, modernity.

Le présent article propose de poser des jalons de réflexions pour construire une géographie politique de l’environnement. Depuis qu’elle est constituée en école nationale, la géographie française n’a jamais vraiment réussi à considérer la question environnementale, fondamentalement politique, comme faisant ontologiquement corps avec son champ d’intervention. Malgré les enjeux contemporains environnementaux, elle continue de le faire. D’abord parce qu’elle n’a pas définitivement abandonné l’idée selon laquelle le retrait de la discipline vis-à-vis de l’environnement viendrait de sa capacité spécifique de distanciation objectivante. Ensuite parce qu’elle n’arrive pas à capitaliser un savoir propre sur l’environnement alors que d’autres discipline, comme la biologie, ont trouvé une visibilité nouvelle par ce biais. Quand bien même les géographes s’intéressent à cette question, ils laissent trop souvent de côté les réflexions sur les politiques de la nature et sur les tensions heuristiques nature/culture pour rester dans une vision en phase avec le corpus historique de la discipline. Pourtant, post-déterminisme et globalisation imposent une révision en profondeur des schémas épistémologiques de la discipline.

La conservation de la biodiversité comme zone d’expérimentation de nouveaux paradigmes et l’apparition contraignante d’un nouvel espace d’action cosmopolitique illustrent très bien cette nécessité. Parce que la conservation a longtemps matérialisé des positions opposées de l’écologie et de la géographie dans leurs façons de gérer l’espace et leurs liens au politique, les géographes n’ont que très peu étudié ce domaine d’activité. Il est pourtant historiquement traversé par des phénomènes proprement géographiques. Désormais inscrite dans les politiques de développement, la conservation se transnationalise et se localise simultanément. Déplacée d’une enclave naturelle vers une arène politique, elle peut aussi être envisagée comme un lieu d’expérimentation d’une nouvelle façon d’habiter le monde, à la fois post-naturelle et post-nationale. De façon concomitante, les processus de mondialisation, les questions de changements globaux, imposent un nouvel univers conceptuel fait de disjonctions, d’hybridation, d’interdépendances et d’interrelations. Un nouveau champ d’expériences et de responsabilités globales et individuelles est ouvert. Ces nouveaux espaces d’action, dépassant l’État-nation et le clivage nature/culture requièrent un tournant épistémologique. Ce pourrait être celui d’une nouvelle géographie politique de l’environnement, une géographie cosmopolitique.

Mots-clefs : géographie politique, environnement, conservation, écologie, dualisme, nature, culture, cosmopolitiques, mondialisation, modernité."""

"Le cosmopolitisme est une idée ancienne, presque aussi ancienne que la philosophie elle-même. Toutefois, le fait de se dire « citoyen du monde » ne désigne pas exactement la même chose selon les époques et selon les auteurs. L’objet de cet ouvrage est donc double : d’une part, clarifier ce que signifie cette formule au milieu de ses différents emplois; d’autre part, rendre compte de son actualité particulière, à la fois sur le plan politique et sur le plan moral. Un citoyen du monde est-il « citoyen » au même titre qu’on peut l’être d’un État? La perspective cosmopolitique n’est-elle pas une voie qui acquiert aujourd’hui une pertinence nouvelle?

La partie "commentaire" de l'ouvrage propose une analyse de l'article de Martha Nussbaum (Patriotism et cosmopolitanism) et du troisième article définitif du Projet de Paix Perpétuelle de Immanuel Kant."

Growing attention is being paid to the increasing incidence of expert and lay citizen encounters in the processes of technological implementation. This poses the problem of the nature of participation, now a quite common topic in the field of science and technology studies. We offer firstly a brief review of the main issues regarding participation through deliberative participatory methods, pointing out their main strengths and weaknesses. Then, we propose Participatory Action Research as a way of improving and strengthening participation, especially in the field of telehealthcare. This is illustrated through an example extracted from our research with older people and telecare devices. Finally, participation is analysed as the critical issue in order to underpin the democratisation of research as a whole, offering the practice of cosmopolitics as a key to achieve such an end.

This essay traces the ontological and political limits of Bruno Latour’s conceptualization of the ‘common world’. Latour formulates this concept in explicating how modernist scientific and political institutions require a metaphysical foundation that is antidemocratic in rigidly partitioning nature from society. In the stead of nature/society, Latour proposes a ‘cosmopolitics’ in which we recognize our embroilment in systems comprised of heterogeneous human and nonhuman actors, and seek to innovate appropriate procedures for governing such systems and composing a more peaceful common world. However, feminist and postcolonialist science studies scholars have argued that Latour’s project fails to apprehend the experiences of subjects marginalized by scientific and political structures of representation. Thus, science studies scholars seem to be faced with a problem; to avoid ontological dissonance and contradiction in integrating Latour’s program with feminist and postcolonialist critiques we must defer his claims that the cosmopolitical program entirely supersedes contemporary social movements and oppositional politics. I offer an alternative. Namely, I argue that Latour’s formulations of cosmopolitics’ procedures and the common world’s boundaries actually require an incipient model of the limits of democratic representation. I modify Latour’s proposed system of representation by reading it against Dipesh Chakrabarty’s concept of ‘subaltern pasts’, which are inassimilable to academic historical narratives (in their attribution of agency to nonhuman gods, for example). This reading emphasizes how Latour does not adequately theorize and politicize the partially autonomous reality of those excluded from the common world and thus fails to attend to how this externalization replicates the violence of modernist representational institutions.