Fuori scala. La Flat Ecology di Bruno Latour

Abstract

This paper aims at showing the consequences of Bruno Latour’s endorsement of the anti-holist, “flat” ontology (an ontology that denies that difference in scale is an ontological difference) shared by many speculative realists. While this assumption presents notorious problems on the political side, it will be shown to have explicative and pragmatic potential when it comes to political ecology. After exploring his treatment of the concept of scale, which draws on Gabriel Tarde’s monadological sociology, Latour’s radical democraticism, for which scale depends only on the number of connections and “alliances” an actor is able to put into existence, will be compared to Timothy Morton’s hyperobjects hypotheses, another ecology based on a peculiar treatment of the notion of scale, in order to show the advantages and the potential of Latour’s ecology of fragility. The aim of Latour’s politics is the composition of a common world, but this composition has no superior guarantor, and even Gaia, the holistic entity par excellence, cannot be brought into existence without an assembly of allies that Latour compares to a war declaration.