Latour: The thing is the thing

Bruno Latour spoke this evening to an overflow crowd on the topic of ‘Ecology and Democracy.’ The main substance of his talk was devoted to a largely sympathetic discussion of Break Through, the recently published book (here’s a Wired review) by Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, in which they take up the argument that they set out in their well-known 1994 essay ‘The Death of Environmentalism‘ criticizing the environmental movement for falling back on a politics of limits and an ascetic ethic that should be replaced in favor of a ‘politics of possibility’ (a phrase that Latour skewered as anodyne and toothless, for all intents and purposes).

Too tired to really discuss the talk at the moment – if I were being facetious and glib, I’d just say the talk was about asking whether or not environmentalism has, or should have, a ‘vision’ that moves us into the future rather than scares us off from the future, as Nordhaus/Shellenberger argue. I’m not thought through the argument to figure out whether I completely buy it, but that’s for another day.

In any event, it’s been a little while since I’ve seen an academic pack a room as Latour managed to do with all kinds of people – from suits to sweaters to sweats, so to speak. As the room started to fill my friend and classmate KC and I congratulated ourselves on arriving nearly an hour in advance to grab good seats, but then we got rather nervous as lines of people just continued to stream in, as if coming to a teach-in. I had been told that Latour, whom I’d never seen live before, was deadly dull, an incomprehensible speaker, but he spoke quickly, confidently, and in that witty and playfully ironic style (his detractors might call it snarky) that’s evident in his writings, which he referenced frequently throughout his talk (’remember, we have never been modern.’)

One person in the audience did raise the familiar question about assigning ‘agency’ to the non-human, i.e., to things. The usual criticism is that it’s tantamount to a kind of anthropomorphism, but this time the criticism was that it constitutes a dehumanization of agency, a stripping away of the ‘desires’ and ‘emotions’ of people from the very concept of agency. At the risk of distorting his response, Latour’s answer was that humans have always been involved in things; it’s a modernist pretense to think that agency, politics, is about something called the ’social’ divorced from ‘things.’ Things are not out there but fully within, and this is what the present-day concern with ecology and environment and technology highlights. In this respect etymology, long-ago usage, may be more instructive: the thing is derived from the assembly, a gathering occasioned by uncertainty, by the need for judgment, and ultimately of politics. Whatever emotive and ethical attachments we have to agency, it should not come at the cost of banishing the ‘thing’ from its legitimate domain.

And on that note, here’s the etymology of ‘thing,’ a word that I had not thought to look up before:

O.E. þing “meeting, assembly,” later “entity, being, matter” (subject of deliberation in an assembly), also “act, deed, event, material object, body, being,” from P.Gmc. *thengan “appointed time” (cf. O.Fris. thing “assembly, council, suit, matter, thing,” M.Du. dinc “court-day, suit, plea, concern, affair, thing,” Du. ding “thing,” O.H.G. ding “public assembly for judgment and business, lawsuit,” Ger. ding “affair, matter, thing,” O.N. þing “public assembly”). Some suggest an ultimate connection to PIE root *ten- “stretch,” perhaps on notion of “stretch of time for a meeting or assembly.” For sense evolution, cf. Fr. chose, Sp. cosa “thing,” from L. causa “judicial process, lawsuit, case;” L. res “affair, thing,” also “case at law, cause.” Old sense is preserved in second element of hustings and in Icelandic Althing, the nation’s general assembly. Southern U.S. pronunciation thang attested from 1937. The thing “what’s stylish or fashionable” is recorded from 1762. Phrase do your thing “follow your particular predilection,” though associated with hippie-speak of 1960s is attested from 1841. Used colloquially since 1602 to indicate things the speaker can’t name at the moment, often with various meaningless suffixes, e.g. thingumbob (1751), thingamajig (1824).

Source: http://www.etymonline.com/