Title

How to React to a Change in Cosmology

Author(s)Bruno Latour

Language

EnglishEvent title

The 2021 Kyoto Prize Commemorative Lecture

Publisher

Inamori FoundationIssue Date

10/01/2022

Start page1

End page

4

URL

https://www.kyotoprize.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/2021_latour_en.pdf

URL for Japanese translation: https://www.kyotoprize.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/2021_latour_jp.pdf

The 2021 Kyoto Prize Commemorative Lecture
Bruno Latour

How to React to a Change in Cosmology
It’s very moving to have received the Kyoto Prize here, because this is the place where forfour generations the Latour’s family has lived and got its luck, so to speak, because of a plight: The
phylloxera destroyed entirely everything else here, the whole wine region of Burgundy, and it wasthen replanted and replenished much later, especially in this neighborhood, in Corton, by mygreat-great-grandfather. The other reason, of course, is that wine is entirely about fermentation andmicrobes and bacillus and all of those ferments, and it’s of course something which we are now
very much reminded of because of the Covid epidemic.
So, I will use the Covid as a sort of lead, because of a type of entity that viruses have taught
us—a very harsh teaching, of course—during those two last years. We learned from—collectively,of course, if you are a specialist of viruses, you didn’t learn anything, but we, the whole earthly
community, so to speak—we learned something about viruses: the virality, so to speak, of that typeof agent. The virality of the way it spread is extremely typical of viruses and microbes. First, welearned, which is quite extraordinary, that from basically January, a year and a half ago, and threeweeks later, the virus going from mouth to mouth, from mouth to hand, from one person toanother person, starting probably somewhere in China, spread out ever ywhere and became
completely globalized. That sort of connectedness, sort of very fast speed, is typical of virality. So is
the surprising speed at which it mutates, and we learned again, somewhat tragically, how fast thevirus is actually learning other habits, so to speak, through this multiplication of variants which we
now follow in the press everyday, which, again, we are very surprised by. And the other thingwhich I have studied for years is of course that it completely modified our social relations: We had
to wear masks, we had to distance ourselves. And those social relations are not only modified
among families, inside a small circle, not only nationally, inside any given nation, Japan or France,
but it was also an amazing experience of relearning connections between countries. I mean, as weknow, we cannot go from one countr y to the next, and we learn ever yday that this countr y isavailable, but not that country, etc.
So, the whole connectedness of human relations was modified by the insertion of the virus’s
own way of connecting and connecting people globally. So, it has a different view of the global, itsown way of globalizing. It has a different view of mutating and it has a different view of modifying
every other entity, including humans, bacteria of course, inside which it inserts itself. And that’svery interesting, and of course, for me especially because I’ve studied Louis Pasteur, the great
French bacteriologist, many years ago. And of course, what I studied in Pasteur’s case, that is how
microbes inserted into society in the 19th century have deeply modified what we could call thesocial order at the time. And we re-learned that with the AIDS, of course, a tragic story, we are stilllearning it, and with every epidemic, but we will learn it globally with the Covid. And that’s what
interests me.
So, I want to use virality as a guide, as a sort of token, a mascot, because every cosmology has
its own privileged object, if I can say that, and I want to contrast what was the privileged object
before and what is now the privileged object, which I will argue is something like the virus’s type ofvirality, or actually in English, also vitality, which is so typical of the sort of situation in which weare now embedded. So, I want to argue about a shift in cosmology—and I use “cosmology” asanthropologists would do, as sort of a structure that distributes agencies around. So, I want to startwith a very strange puzzle: Why were we surprised by the emergence of the virus? I mean, this is1

an absolutely normal way in which they spread, microbes have done that forever, we know thatwhen we do a fermentation in the wine business right here, and we were nonetheless completely
surprised to have to change the whole fabric of our society because of the emergence of this virus.
So, that’s what I want to understand: Why were we puzzled by a type of entity which is so
absolutely typical of the way the world in which we live and have ever lived is being built?
So, I want to contrast it with an older privileged object of the cosmology earlier. We could say
that, if we are looking for a typical object, we would probably, at least in the Western imagination,
use Galileo’s inclined plane, where the rolling balls go down in order to calculate the laws of fallingbodies. I mean, if there is one canonic example, an icon, of what we imagine the world to functionin the past cosmology, that would be it. You have a plane, you have big billiard balls that go aroundand that’s what allows to connect. Now, the problem with this privileged object is that it has twover y strange consequences. The first consequence is that it works only in ideal conditions—because of course when Galileo did the experiment, as every historian of science knows, it was notexactly as accurate as he said, because you had to forget all of the consequences, all of theresistance of the air, and so on. So, the law which was of course discovered by Galileo, and then, ofcourse, by the whole Newtonian mechanics, etc., works, but only in ideal conditions. So, you haveto shift away, so to speak, from the ways in which we, as living bodies, live, in order to say that thislaw is actually fully and completely calculable. Which is not a problem, I mean, every science has toidealize its object.
But there is one second consequence which is slightly more worrying. It’s that the scientists
themselves, so to speak, imagine that they are themselves transported somewhere in the out-ofspace abstract calculable model. They confuse the invention they have of the world, of the idealworld, with they themselves being somewhere idealized in another world, which is well-known now
in the science critique by the word “view from nowhere.” So, the science has been sort of shiftedaway and the scientists have been shifted away from the practical consequences of their own living,so to speak, existence. That’s a very unfortunate consequence, because it means that when we talkabout those privileged objects that are falling bodies the scientists that know about them in a sortof view from nowhere, they are themselves nowhere. And that I think is one of the reasons why wewere so surprised by the emergence of the virus. Of course, we know that the origin of this view
from nowhere, at least in the Western tradition, is actually a consequence of a theology, Christiantheology of God, which is an all-powerful God, which is itself, himself, or herself, nowhere. So, how
could I say, the “nowhereness” of the science imagination, what is called the “scientific view of theworld” is, in the Western tradition, a descendant of theology and of Christian theology.
So, if we take this privileged object of the first cosmology, I think that explains in part why wewere so surprised by the emergence of all the sorts of globalizing virus. Because, if you have as
your canonic example of what the world is made of the falling bodies which I take as a canonicalmascot, so to speak, of the earlier cosmology, life forms are very strange! Life forms have nowhere
to go, they have to be pigeonholed, so to speak, in the view from nowhere, but they are completelydifferent. Their grammar, so to speak, of agency, the way they behave, is entirely different. And, as
you know, biology had always great difficulty in entering, in sort of being pigeonholed, into thetradition coming from mechanics, physics and so on, all the way from the beginning of the 17thcentury to the mid-20th century. Why? Because, life forms—and again, the Covid is a very good
example of that—they react ver y fast, so they are constantly, sort of agitated by other sort ofbehaviors, they mutate, as I said, we observe that all the time with different variants, they adapt
very quickly, they converge sometimes, they overlap with one another, and they have connections
with one another. Viruses—we don’t even know if viruses are our enemies or our friends! So, wecannot even locate them. Sometimes we need viruses—if we have no viruses and no bacteria, wewould not survive—and sometimes we have to fight them, or find a solution to accommodate theirvery quick way of mutating. So, we have a completely strange relation: strange by comparison with2

the other canonical model which was used in our former cosmology, but completely normal in thisworld in which we live. So, this is a great, I think, a great source of surprise, and the reason why
the Covid epidemic was so completely surprising. The grammar of agency is completely different if
you take now the viruses as the typical object of what resembles to be a new cosmology. And ofcourse, Darwin was supposed to make a big difference, but in fact even in Darwin, organisms aresupposed to be obeying an order of nature, which are the laws of nature being natural selection,
which play about the same role as the laws of falling bodies in the canonical tradition. So, Darwindid not modify deeply this sort of situation: There was still an order of nature. And what weobserve today is that there is no order of nature, there are viruses upon viruses, upon bacteria,upon organisms, etc., which are constantly moving in and building this world of ours.
So, what I could now conclude from that is that, today, we are shifting from one privileged
object, which I described as the falling bodies example, to another one, which I would say is mystrange idea of taking virality as the best example. But, if we do it, we have to land somewhere, wehave to actually situate ourselves inside a world of organisms, for which the virus, and thegrammar of agency that it represents, is absolutely typical of the situation. Of course, it was there
before: I mean, there was virology, bacteriology, all sorts of sciences of those entities before. But
they were at the margin of the privileged object of the first cosmology; and now we are moving toanother cosmology, where the privileged object is this virus. And what is really interesting, and I
want to do my second part of my little argument with this, is that it has enormous consequences. It
has a big consequence for what I’ve called in a recent book the new climatic regime. The newclimatic regime is the situation inside which we find now ourselves. First, if you take the viruses
and virality as the privileged object of a new cosmology, science is no longer a view from nowhere.
Science is inser ted inside the life of organisms, as we saw magnificently during the Covid
lockdown. I mean, we learned a lot about epidemiology, we learned a lot about the difficulty ofknowing what the virus was doing. All of the sciences which were mobilized during this period
were highly visible, made explicitly visible, disputed in the popular press as well as in the scientificpress. So, there was no way we could actually do for the science of the viruses what had been done
before for the science of mechanics, with the scientists going away and imagining that they had aview from nowhere. No, no, no, they had a view from here, and they were very much inserted into
all the controversies about the virus and how it was actually followed, and, in the magnificent caseof the vaccines, how quickly it was possible to actually control some of its activity—only some of its
activities, because you know the imbroglios and all the difficulty to pursue the vaccination in every
country.
The second, of course, big consequence of this shift in cosmology is that we begin to learn, to
our great dismay, at least in Western tradition and Western society, about the constant activity andthe quick reactivity of all these living entities. And the most amazing thing is that this is true at thevery small scale of the virus and at the extremely big scale of the atmosphere. Because, after all,the whole geopolitics now is around this question of climate control, and the complexity of making
the climate the result of the activity, not only of the life forms in the past, but of the human life
forms in the present. So, at the two extremes, at the viruses and at the atmospheric levels, welearned that, at an extraordinary speed, living forms react to our actions and we are reacting totheir actions—we got sick from the viruses, and the atmosphere got sick, so to speak, from ourown activity in the last hundred years. So, it changed the default position, if you want. Before, thesethings were known, but they were peripheral, they were marginal. Now they are absolutely
necessar y, they are the default position with which to compare, so to speak, ever y single
movement and agency.
And the third consequence, and I will conclude on that, is that of course the canonical object,
the preferred mascot of the earlier cosmology, triggered a different project for the evolution andthe drive, the vector of history. History was supposed to be a movement to try, as far as you could,3to escape from the earth, and live in this imagined world of the scientific vision of the world, as it
had been imagined by the first cosmology taking the Galilean laws of falling bodies as its privileged
object, so to speak. I simplified, of course, I dramatized, but it’s to make the point much clearer. But
now, if you take virality, viruses, the way they spread, the way they react to our actions, and if you
take it at the two levels of the extremely small and the extremely big, and all of the intermediary,
you are in a different project. You enter into very much a different history. And that’s the complete
shift from what I’ve called, in several books and a long career, the end of the modernist project.
Modernism in the Western tradition was completely driven by this vector, completely driven by
this idea that we could actually shift out of the world, in some sort of strange way, with a sort ofstrange imagination that there was a world of infinite access and infinite resources. Now, we areback to Earth. Now there is no way. You can’t actually move out of the Earth. You have to get backinto it. And this is what I’ve been arguing for many years, but I have to say that the Covid epidemic
was so prodigiously instructive for all of us, because of this connection with the climate crisis itself.
So, it’s two crises, sort of lodged into one another: one for the medical, so to speak, and one for thecosmological.
Well, that’s exactly why we now have to work on a new project, which is something probably
ver y different from the modernist project: science, the art, and the law, and all of the moral
sciences. So, I’m very proud of receiving this Prize, and thank you again very much for giving thePrize, because that is the sort of thing that I’d like to push in the rest of my career: what is thealternative to the modernist project if we have to live here and not there. I mean, I know there arepeople who want to go to Mars, but it’s the sort of project of the past. The future is actually to getback here. And it’s very amusing for me to say that, here, in my own house, so to speak, and in the
deeply microbe-built, how could I have that, if it’s one thing which is microbe-built, it’s actually thewine. So, maybe at the end of this little talk, we will celebrate it in some ways, and I will try to find away to celebrate the Kyoto Prize. Thank you very much again.

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