#danowski

This is the most significant phenomenon of the present century: ‘the intrusion of Gaia’ (Stengers 2015), brusque and abrupt, into the horizon o f human history; the sensation of a definitive return of a form of transcendence that we believed transcended, and which reappears in more formidable form than ever. The transformation of humans into a geological force, that is, into an ‘objective’ phenomenon or ‘natural’ object, is paid back with the intrusion of Gaia in the human world, giving the Earth System the menacing form of a historical subject, a political agent, a moral person (Latour 2013a). In an ironic and deadly (because recursively contradictory) inversion of the relation between figure and ground, the ambiented becomes the ambient (or ‘ambienting’) , and the converse is equally the case. It is effectively the collapse of an ever more ambiguous environment, of which we can no longer say where it is in relation to us, and us to it.

Naturally, the empirical finitude of our species is something that the vast majority of Western-educated people have learned to admit since, say, at least Darwin. We know that ‘the world and life started without us and will end without us,’ as in Levi-Strauss' (1961: 397) oft-remembered, and oft-plagiarized, statement. But when the scales of collective and individual finitude enter into a convergent trajectory, this cognitive truth suddenly becomes an inconvenient affective truth to manage. It is one thing to know that the Earth and even the entire universe will disappear come billions of years, or that, long before that but in a still indeterminate future, the human species will become extinct -- even though the latter knowledge is often sublimated by the hope that we will morph into  ‘another species,’ even if that notion is lacking in any precise meaning. It is another, rather different thing to imagine the situation posited by present scientific knowledge within our field of imminent possibilities: that the next generations (the generations next to us) will have to survive in an impoverished, sordid environment; an ecological desert, a sociological hell. In other words, it is one thing to theoretically know that we will die; it is another to receive news from our doctor, test results in hand, that we are suffering from a terminal disease.