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A Book of the Body Politic: Connecting Biology, Politics and Social Theory Edited by Bruno Latour, Simon Schaffer, Pasquale Gagliardi San Giorgio Dialogue 2017

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A Book of the Body Politic: Connecting Biology, Politics and Social Theory Edited by Bruno Latour, Simon Schaffer, Pasquale Gagliardi San Giorgio Dialogue 2017 Edited by Bruno Latour, Simon Schaffer, Pasquale Gagliardi A Book of the Body Politic Connecting Biology, Politics and Social Theory San Giorgio Dialogue 2017 Bruno Latour, Simon Schaffer, Pasquale Gagliardi Editors A Book of the Body Politic Connecting Biology, Politics and Social Theory Bruno Latour Emeritus Professor Sciences Po Paris, France Simon Schaffer Department of History & Philosophy of Science University of Cambridge Cambridge, United Kingdom Pasquale Gagliardi Secretary General Fondazione Giorgio Cini Venezia, Italy ISBN 9788896445228 © Fondazione Giorgio Cini 2020. This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or in- formation storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Photo on front cover: Zodiac Man. Joannes de Ketham, Fasciculus medicinae, Venice: Giovanni e Gregorio de’ Gregori, 1491 (Venice, Fondazione Giorgio Cini). A Book of the Body Politic: Connecting Biology, Politics and Social Theory Edited by Bruno Latour, Simon Schaffer, Pasquale Gagliardi San Giorgio Dialogue 2017 “Do you remember the Aesopian Fable of the Belly and the Members, or the letter of Paul to the Corinthians about the Body and the Church, or The Fable of the Bees by Mandeville, or the somewhat dangerous association of pests and foreigners, or the more recent attempts to think of the Earth as a giant organism? None of these stories stops shifting metaphors between one domain—that of the body—and another—that of politics. The result has been the creation of that most important concept of Western philosophy, corpus politicum, the Body Politic. One interesting aspect of this most famous topic is that every domain borrows from each other the certainty associated with the other’s authority, so that political science ends up borrowing from biology what biologists borrow from political theory. This constant commerce of concepts and metaphors, unfortunately, has never guaranteed the quality of what has been ceaselessly transported from one domain to another. The result is that we remain deprived of a coherent definition of collective bodies. Hence the idea of attempting to re-open the question in a Dialogue of San Giorgio by bringing the different domains together and examine what each has really to offer to the others that is genuinely proper to the phenomena it studies. This book is the outcome of three days of intense confrontation among experts of various disciplines (biology, philosophy, ecology, social theory, anthropology, history of science, political science) aimed at finding a new body’s description for the Body Politic.” VIII-310 pages; 27 illustrations Acknowledgments The editors would like to thank all the contributors for the thought and care they have shown to this project, making it a truly collective dialogue. Simon Schaffer and Pasquale Gagliardi are particularly grateful to Bruno Latour for his insatia- ble curiosity, his intellectual rigor, and the enthusiasm that he profounds in every project that involves him. Finally, this book would not have been possible without the innumerable contributions of Anna Lombardi (Segreteria Generale of the Cini Foundation). Anna’s steadfast, exacting, skillful and generous work has been essen- tial to this project. The editors wish to express their sincere gratitude to her for all she has done. Contents Bruno Latour, Simon Schaffer, and Pasquale Gagliardi 1 Preface: Origin and context DAY ONE (Wednesday 13th September 2017) 1. Bruno Latour 19 Composing the New Body Politic from Bits and Pieces 2. Deborah M. Gordon 39 The Ecology of Collective Behavior 3. Timothy Mitchell 49 The Body Politic that Captured the Future 4. Scott F. Gilbert 75 Metaphors for a New Body Politic: Gaia as Holobiont 5. Mike Lynch 89 Sem(b)iosis and the Political Economy of Nature DAY TWO (Thursday 14th September 2017) 6. Feedback on Day One 117 7. Tim Lenton 139 Gaia as a Collective Phenomenon 8. Isabelle Stengers 159 The Cultivation of Ways of Overlapping: a Matter of Reclaiming 9. Kyle McGee 175 For a Juridical Ecology of Ligatures 10. David Western 187 Scaling up the Governance of the Commons to Sustaining our Planet DAY THREE (Friday 15th September 2017) 11. Feedback on Day Two 215 12. Shirley Strum 239 Lessons for the Anthropocene from the Socio-Ecological Worlds of Baboons 13. Didier Debaise 247 From Nature to Precarious Lives 14. Simon Schaffer 263 Of the Body of Politics and the Body of Nature Bruno Latour 285 Afterword: Politics - A Glimpse at Bodybuilding Biographies of Contributors 303 PREFACE Origin and context Bruno Latour, Simon Schaffer, Pasquale Gagliardi In the last two decades, it has become the good and generous custom of the Giorgio Cini Foundation to host regular meetings in Venice under the name of ‘Dialoghi di San Giorgio.’ These dialogues ingeniously and hospitably assemble participants from a range of different fields and with very different kinds of expe- rience and expertise to debate issues of pressing urgency in contemporary culture and society. One goal of the Dialoghi has therefore always been deliberately to form a productive collective by the careful assemblage of a set of selected individuals. It seemed apt to make this goal itself the focus of the 2017 meeting. No topic, of course, could be more challenging and more significant to the current crises of political order and of ecological catastrophe, both dominated in connected ways by the obvious weakness and indeed delusion of the terms in which political groups and natural systems are characterized. Hence arises the pressing need to create con- structive communities out of their components and at the same time to protect particulars and persons in a potent public polity. Plans and conversations for the Dialogo were developed by Bruno Latour, Pasquale Gagliardi and Simon Schaffer from the autumn of 2016, to define more precisely the political and scientific issues which must be addressed to make sense of how better to understand the relation between collective and individual agency across the wider range of knowledge. In turn, these plans were also focused on the selection of those who would be well-placed to reflect on how models of communi- ty and of agency have been used, and then revised, in specific sciences. Indeed, this was a key part of the shared initial intuition of the dialogue’s organizers: questions 2 B. LATOUR, S. SCHAFFER, AND P. GAGLIARDI such as the puzzle of those telling shifts between imagery of social collectives so often used in the explanatory techniques of biosciences, or the imagery of ani- mal communities relentlessly exploited in sciences of economy and society are not merely ubiquitous in the politics of knowledge, but very often explicitly recognized by the practitioners themselves. The wager of the Dialogo was thus to assemble a group of peculiarly careful and reflective practitioners of the natural and the social sciences, working with full awareness of this epoch’s dramatic challenges of the new climatic regime and the crises of political legitimacy, and to invite reflexion from them, individually and collectively, on better ways of dealing with such tricky, shifty and barely satisfactory images of order in life and in labor. The plan was straightforward: participants were each provided with a ‘Manifes- to’—see next section—setting out the challenges of political and natural imagery, and invited first to offer all the other members of the group one or two of their own writings that would provide a shared group of reference works for the conversation. Before the Dialogo itself, in September 2017, these participants also prepared their own brief statements, organised in a pairwise manner as conversations between the members of the collective. And during the three days of the meeting at San Giorgio most of the time was thus devoted to brief initial presentations by participants, followed by much lengthier exchanges between all members of the Dialogo. The focus on imagery in politics and the sciences, and on the forms of expertise which seem relevant to making sense of collective and of group action, proved a fascinat- ing and rebarbative theme. The results, and the process, are evident in the volume that follows. The ‘Manifesto’ The ‘Introductory Note’ (or the ‘Manifesto’) which was sent to all the experts in- vited to the 2017 Dialogue, was written by the planning team, composed of Bruno Latour, Simon Schaffer and Pasquale Gagliardi. It ran as follows: «Do you remember the Aesopian Fable of the Belly and the Members, or the letter of Paul to the Corinthians about the Body and the Church, or The Fable of the Bees by Mandeville, or the somewhat dangerous association of pests and foreigners, or the more recent attempts to think of the Earth as a giant organism? None of these stories stops shifting metaphors between one domain—that of the body—and another—that of politics.
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